Street Roots • May 19-25, 2017
News
KLOOS, from page 4
forest. There’s a remembrance deep within
us that comes from being connected in that
way, which is something that - if you go
back in time in our human evolution, it has
not been that long since we have been apart
from that.
One of the best ways I’ve found is just
doing the things that I talk about in this
book, which is going out and identifying the
plants, making connections with them,
harvesting them to make medicine and
ingesting that medicine that we make from
those wild plants that brings us more into
that relationship.
P H O T O e v SCOTT KLO O S
5 whorls of 3. They will eventually ripen into
Where, when and how to wildcraft
This shade-tolerant plant prefers the semi
open forests west of the Cascades and car
be found from sea level to middle
E .G .: I wasn’t surprised to see St. John’s
wort and lemon balm among the remedies in
your book, but I was less familiar with
Douglas fir and Oregon grape being used
medicinally. I did a quick Google search, and
it turns out they’ve been used medicinally for
hundreds, i f not thousands, of years. But I
was wondering, are all the remedies outlined
in your book backed by peer-reviewed studies
that show their medicinal quality, or do we
need more research in this realm of medicine?
S.K.: For some, there is that peer-
reviewed research, but the problem with
that is that there is no money involved.
People doing that kind of research, mostly,
are looking for something they can patent
and make money from. But there are some
- in fact St. John’s wort has had a lot
studies done on it that prove what we
already knew about its uses.
Most of the information is based on
traditional uses over time, whether it’s from
the native people here, who are still
working with and using these medicines, or
from similar plants that grow in Europe or
on the East Coast that people have been
working with for a long time, but
interestingly enough, I have the sense that
this area of the world just may be the place
where we least understand the medicinal
properties of the plants.
On the East Coast, when the Europeans
arrived, there was a lot of interaction
between the Native people and the
Europeans and sharing of knowledge, and
for obvious reasons, that willingness
changed by the time the Europeans got to
this side of the continent. So we’re learning
about some of this stuff on our own, and
there is still a lot of plants out there that we
don’t know the medicinal properties hardly
at all, if at all. So it’s kind of an exciting
time and place to be an herbalist, if that’s a
direction you want to go about learning -
increasing the knowledge about plants.
But the plants in the book are pretty well
known. For myself, with the direct
experience that I have, and also my peers
and colleagues and people that I respect
who have done a lot of work with these
medicines, the scientific studies are kind of
icing on the cake, but still valid information
to have. And if it helps other people feel
more confident in using these plants as
medicines, then I’m all for it. But I’m
definitely not into the idea of people doing
research and then turning the medicines
into a huge money-making commodity.
One of the problems with some of the
scientific research, St. John’s wort is a good
example: In Europe, they do a lot of
scientific research with the plant because
it’s an accepted part of medical-doctor
usage to some degree, where it isn’t so
Page 5
much here, and so with St. John’s wort,
they did studies where they said, we’re
going to find the active ingredient. And they
thought, “OK, it’s this oil called hypericin,”
and they started cultivating plants that were
higher in hypericin, and what they found
was, five or 10 years later, they figured out
it’s not hypericin; it’s this other thing, and
then they spent all this energy, and in the
end, what matters is the whole plant. We
can’t think of the plant in that non-holistic
way.
E.G .: Can you explain what wildcrafting is?
S.K.: We use the term “wildcrafting” to
distinguish from harvesting because
harvesting, in my mind, implies a mentality
of: Everything is there for the taking by
humans, and so we just take it. The “craft”
part of wildcrafting is the art of connecting
with not only the plant, but the ecosystem
where it grows and understanding all the
different facets that go into creating the
conditions for that plant to thrive.
For one, we don’t want to harvest
endangered or rare plants. Two, you want to
make sure you can correctly identify the
plant. And then, making a whole range of
assessments that I describe in the book,
regarding the viability of the plant and who
or what else depends on the plant. If there’s
a plant that a certain caterpillar, moth uses
to lay its eggs, and the larvae grow there,
and we harvest a bunch of it and there’s not
enough for them, that has ramifications that
cascade to other animals that might eat that
insect. So we want to do it in a way that’s
careful, that will allow the plant and the
stand of plants to thrive so that ultimately
the goal is to have there be more there
than when we started.
E .G .: In your book, when you lay out how
you approach medicinal uses, you wrote that
you avoid the “What is this good fo r?”
mentality. So how do you approach the
medicinal question?
S.K.: I don’t like to think about it that
way, but that’s what ends up happening
when I take people on out on trips; they
ask, “What’s that good for?” And “What’s
that good for?” And that’s coming from that
same place I was talking about where we’re
just looking for the magic bullet that’s going
to heal one thing. We need to look at it
more holistically, and the way I like to think
about it is: developing relationships with the
plants. For me, the plants have been my
teachers, on all levels. They can help teach
the body how to function in a more
harmonious way, on the physical level and
then also on emotional and spiritual levels
as well, developing relationships with them
helps us on that level also.
E .G .: And maybe this is what you mean
when you say “psycho-spiritual” properties of
plants (the topic of his next book), but for
someone who is unfamiliar with herbal
medicine, can you explain what that means?
S.K .: That’s a primary focus of my work.
A good example would be hawthorn, which
is blooming around town right now. It’s an
excellent remedy for the heart on the
physical level, and then on the emotional
level, there are all these teachings it can
bring. It helps soothe a wounded heart and
helps soften a hardened heart, and it
teaches us how to be in touch with our
vulnerability.
See KLOOS, page 7