Schultes's Urgency: Has the Race Been Lost?

“Schultes said in 1967 that ethnopharmacological research was racing against time. The Amazon has since lost 20% of its forest cover. The race has not been won.”

The claim: 'In the search for new hallucinogens, we have much to do and little time in which to do it.' Schultes argued in 1967 that the aspirin pill, the mission school, and the road were destroying indigenous plant knowledge traditions faster than they could be documented.

The Amazon data: The Brazilian Amazon has lost approximately 20% of its original forest cover since Schultes made this statement. An estimated language, the primary carrier of ethnobotanical knowledge, is lost every two weeks globally. Communities that maintained the psychoactive plant knowledge traditions Schultes documented have been disrupted by Western medicine, economics, religion, and legal systems at an accelerating pace.

The response: The field Schultes established has expanded dramatically since 1967. The Society of Ethnobiology, the Amazon Conservation Team (founded by his student Mark Plotkin), ICEERS, and dozens of academic programs now work on documentation and preservation. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (2022) commits signatories to protect 30% of global land by 2030 with specific provisions for indigenous-managed territories.

The asymmetry: Individual documentation and protection efforts have been substantial. They have not matched the scale of loss. The communities whose knowledge Schultes documented have not been reconstituted. The plants he described are in many cases rarer or locally absent. The practitioners who held the knowledge have in many cases died without successors.

Verdict: Was right, and the urgency has increased. Schultes identified in 1967 what is now a mainstream conservation argument: that indigenous knowledge and biological diversity are inseparable, and that losing one loses the other. The race he described is still being lost at the macro scale. The institutions he inspired have slowed but not stopped the loss.

Sources

• Schultes, NIMH Symposium (1967)
• Schultes & Hofmann, Plants of the Gods (1979)
• INPA Amazon Reports (2023)
• CBD Kunming-Montreal Framework (2022)