The Archive and the Fire: Ethnobotany in the Extinction Era

“We are losing knowledge faster than we can document it. The documentation projects are real and insufficient. What Schultes called urgency in 1967 is now crisis.”

In 1967, Richard Evans Schultes told the NIMH symposium in San Francisco that ethnopharmacological research was racing against time. The aspirin pill was arriving. The mission school was transmitting different values. The road was bringing the market. The race to document indigenous plant knowledge before it disappeared was urgent.

Fifty-seven years later, the race he described has not been won. The question is whether it can still be won in meaningful form, or whether the knowledge systems Schultes dedicated his career to documenting are now too damaged to restore.

The evidence: the global language extinction rate, relevant because language is the primary carrier of traditional ecological knowledge, has accelerated. David Harmon and Jonathan Loh's work (for example The Index of Linguistic Diversity, Language Documentation & Conservation, 2010) found that languages and biodiversity are correlated geographically and decline together. The regions with the greatest biological diversity contain the most linguistic diversity; both are under the most pressure. A widely repeated estimate holds that one language is lost every two weeks (Source not found; under review), each taking with it specific knowledge of local ecology, plant uses, and the social context in which that knowledge was transmitted.

The IPBES Global Assessment (2019), the most comprehensive scientific review of biodiversity loss, found that indigenous and local knowledge is declining rapidly alongside the biodiversity it describes. The assessment identified indigenous-managed territories as the most effective conservation units on the planet while documenting the legal and economic pressures that are displacing indigenous peoples from those territories.

The documentation response has been substantial: the Biodiversity Heritage Library has digitized over 60 million pages of botanical literature. The Global Biodiversity Information Facility aggregates millions of specimen records. Ethnobotanical databases at Kew, the Missouri Botanical Garden, and Harvard contain structured records of plant uses across cultures. Schultes's own 24,000 specimens are curated and accessible.

What these archives cannot preserve is what Schultes's colleague Paul Alan Cox called 'the living laboratory of indigenous medicine': the dynamic, context-dependent, community-embedded knowledge that determines when a plant is appropriate, how it is prepared for a specific condition, what spiritual or ceremonial context surrounds its use, and what contraindications experienced practitioners recognize. This knowledge is transmitted person-to-person, in specific landscapes, over years of practice. No database can hold it.

Mark Plotkin's Amazon Conservation Team developed community-controlled knowledge mapping as a partial response: the communities themselves decide what is documented, in what format, and with what access restrictions. The mapped knowledge stays with the community; the ACT provides technical support and legal protection for the territories in which the knowledge is embedded. This approach has documented knowledge in 70+ communities over 30 years.

The limitation: documentation preserves a record of what was known. It does not preserve the capacity to use that knowledge, the trained practitioner who can apply it, the ecological context in which the plants grow, the social institutions that structured its transmission. Schultes's herbarium is one of the most valuable botanical collections in the world. The communities that helped him fill it are smaller, more fragmented, and under more pressure than when he visited them.

The honest assessment of where ethnobotany stands in 2026: the field has done more than Schultes could have imagined in 1967 to document what exists. The forces he identified as threatening, the aspirin pill, the road, the market, have accelerated beyond what the documentation projects can match. The knowledge is being preserved in archives at roughly the same rate as it is being lost from communities. This is not sufficient, and everyone in the field knows it.

Sources

• Schultes, NIMH Symposium (1967)
• Harmon & Loh, Language Documentation & Conservation (2010)
• Brondizio et al., IPBES Global Assessment (2019)
• Biodiversity Heritage Library, Annual Report (2024)