Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Diversity and sustainability: evolution, information and institutions
- Part A Plant communities and the generation of information
- 2 Chemical diversity in plants
- 3 Ethnobotany and the search for balance between use and conservation
- Part B The value of plant-generated information in Pharmaceuticals
- Part C The institutions for regulating information from diversity
- Part D The importance of cultural diversity in biodiversity conservation
- Index
3 - Ethnobotany and the search for balance between use and conservation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Diversity and sustainability: evolution, information and institutions
- Part A Plant communities and the generation of information
- 2 Chemical diversity in plants
- 3 Ethnobotany and the search for balance between use and conservation
- Part B The value of plant-generated information in Pharmaceuticals
- Part C The institutions for regulating information from diversity
- Part D The importance of cultural diversity in biodiversity conservation
- Index
Summary
One of the Lord Buddha's disciples was sent out to find a useless plant. After months and years of wandering, he came back and told the Lord Buddha that there was no such thing. Every plant has a use … one must only find out what that use is.
Human strategies for survival have long depended on an ability to identify and utilize plants. Generations of experience—success, failure and coincidence — have contributed to a very broad base of knowledge of individual plant species and properties which have been perceived as useful; but encroached upon by market demands and acculturation, both indigenous cultures and the diverse species to which they are tied have retreated to habitat remnants covering a fraction of their former area. It is becoming apparent that the preservation of remnants of biological diversity in large part depends on the knowledge and participation of the world's endangered cultures (Durning, 1992). The field of ethnobotany, studying the relation between people and plants, initially developed as a means of distilling and adopting valuable information founded on indigenous experience with plants. Although the research and exchange of valuable, and often profitable information, continues to be a central component of the field, applications for ethnobotanical information are rapidly expanding beyond colonial patterns of the extraction of resources and ideas.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Intellectual Property Rights and Biodiversity ConservationAn Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Values of Medicinal Plants, pp. 45 - 64Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995
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