Forests: MARK PLOTKIN: In Search Of The Shamans' Vanishing Wisdom

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To help nourish that understanding and preserve the wisdom of the shamans, Plotkin founded the not-for-profit Ethnobiology and Conservation Team in 1995. Working from Arlington, Va., offices, Plotkin and his wife Liliana, a Costa Rican conservationist, have forged a network of Internet sites that enables researchers to share information about indigenous peoples. More important, the organization, to be renamed the Amazon Conservation Team in January, has created what might be called the first shaman network. The idea is to encourage younger members of indigenous groups to become shamans' apprentices. Next year A.C.T. will help sponsor a Colombian rain-forest gathering at which 40 shamans and apprentices from nine South American tribes will share secrets.

Plotkin has done a skillful job of reaching a broader audience. He is featured in Amazon, a large-format IMAX film nominated for an Academy Award. His 1993 book, Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice, is in its 16th printing, and a children's book, The Shaman's Apprentice, co-authored by Lynne Cherry, came out this year. Next year he plans to publish Healer's Quest: New Medicines from Mother Nature. Among the remedies described: an antibiotic from a tropical daisy and a painkiller from the skin of the South American poison-dart frog.

And what of the hallucinogenic snuff that made Plotkin's head swim a decade ago? French scientists are studying the ability of an ingredient--sap from a nutmeg tree--to fight fungal infections. That's just one power of "the spirits of the forest." If those spirits were to vanish, the world would be a much poorer place.

--By Christopher Hallowell