ACT In The News | February 2005

In Memory of Richard Evans Schultes by Mark Plotkin

The enormous classroom was like an ethnographic museum. One wall was covered with huge green maps of the Amazon, the flat terrain fractured by the blue lines of rivers whose names were familiar to few outside that region. From the rafters hung Amazonian Indian dance costumes with glistening black demon faces. Two long display cases flanked the room, filled to overflowing with botanical booty from around the world: black palm blowguns from Colombia, shiny silver hashish pipes from India, and tiny bows and arrows from the Congo.

Presiding over the tableau was the great Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, tall, crewcut, and dressed in an immaculate white labcoat, white dress shirt, crimson tie, and silver wire-rimmed glasses. As he called the class to order and began to show his slides, one picture in particular changed my life forever: a scene in which three Indians in grass skirts and bark cloth masks danced at the edge of a jungle clearing.

"Here you see three Indians of the Yukuna tribe doing the sacred Kai-yah-ree dance under the influence of a hallucinogenic potion to keep away the forces of darkness. The one on the left has a Harvard degree. Next slide, please."

From that moment on, I and many, many others were hooked on plants, Indians, and the Amazon.

Schultes was, without question, not only an incredible inspiration to his students but the greatest botanical explorer of the Amazon in the 20th century.

He survived plane crashes, boat sinkings, bandits, civil unrest, hunger, dysentery, beriberi, and repeated bouts of malaria, but he always insisted that he never had any adventures in the jungle. He lived and traveled with Indians for almost 14 years, sometimes among tribes that had never before seen a white man. At one point, he was gone for so long that friends in the Colombian capital of Bogotá had given him up for dead. They were in the process of arranging a memorial service in his honor when he reappeared at the National Herbarium, frightening more than a few fellow botanists.

There was a historic event in Colombia just six days before Dr. Schultes passed away. Ancient shamans from four different tribes studied by Schultes left their jungle home and traveled to the capital city of Bogota. There, they presented representatives of the national government with their Code of Ethics for Shamanic Medicine that they had designed and developed to protect their medical wisdom, their culture, and their ecosystems. Perhaps these healers and their rain forests still harbor the magic which first attracted Richard Evans Schultes so many years ago.

Listen to ACT President Dr. Mark Plotkin on Richard Evans Schultes here.

Special thanks to Dr. Steve Curwood and "Living on Earth" for permission to post this information.