Ethnobotany+Workshop,+March+5,+2011,+Fairchild+Garden

On March 5, 2011, I attended the 'Ethnobotany Workshop' at Fairchild Garden with Lilliam Fernandez. We originally wanted to get ideas for the Greening School Improvement goal that we could implement in the World Languages Curriculum. What I found was that this field (which is basically about how man interacts with the plant world), has applications to almost all of the Ransom curriculum. We started by learning about what this field actually is, and were given many handouts about texts and articles that I have kept to share. I learned that Dr.Dan Austin, who teaches at FIU, is a world expert in this field, and has written a textbook of Ethnobotany. Our knowlegeable instructors, Kiki Mutis and Alison Walker, then took us around the garden ,where we identified many plants with medicinal and cultural uses and significance around the world. Some of the plants are now being investigated in areas such as cancer research. We were given a valuable table that I have kept about these and other plants we did not see. When we returned, we had case studies of ethical issues that have come up with plants, such as pharmaceutical and produce companies upsetting the ecological balance of areas in order to profit, or disrupting cultures by sending missionaries in to correct habits of indigenous people by telling them what to eat, etc. We then broke up into groups that interviewed each other to come up with religious, food, medicinal, practical, emotional, cultural, and linguistic uses of plants that we had experienced in our personal lives After, Kiki Mutis showed us a fascinating video of her trip to Suriname, where she worked with Harvard researcher,Dr. Mark Plotkin, to gather data on the relationship of the native people with the Amazon Plant Life. They are associated with the Amazon Conservation Team, a world famous organization. Finally, we worked directly with plants to make tinctures, dye fabric, make plant pressings, and measure plants for their antibacterial qualities.

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