Third Blog Post on Mangoes

Looking at this gigapan you can see hints of orange and brown, but there is still a lot of green. The oak trees are still fairly green, the maples are the mostly orange and yellow-tinted leaves you see, and the tulip poplars are turning a lights green showing that they will turn into a yellow for the fall. Each tree's leaves fall at different times. I suspect that this is because they have different rates of absorbing nutrients from the leaves due to the distance from the leaves to the roots and the amount of leaves on the tree.

Shakespeare for Breakfast

In my very first blog post I assessed the ability of books in an economic collapse to be used as currency. Looking back I still believe that this would be a wonderful form of currency. However, through this class I have come to terms with the hardship of a currency. It is subject to change because of the fickleness of people. This was assessed by Polland in "The Botany of Desire" in reference to the tullipmania. Not only this, but in an economic crisis books would greatly depreciate in value and would most likely would be used for kindling before currency. Books have an alternate use as entertainment, but the needs of stability in food and shelter come before entertainment. Thus, I'm not so sure that after an economic collapse books would be used as currency. However, if deforestation comes first then that would be a better scenario for this.

Hidden Health in Magoes?

I found a really interesting article called "Medicinal and Other Economic Plants of the Paya of Honduras" by David L. Lentz in the Economic Botany Journal. The Paya are a people in in Honduras. In 1985 the population was 1595. However, in 1997 it was less than 1500. This tribe used to believe in a supreme deity, but are now mainly Christian. In 1993 there was still a big emphasis on shamans and plant remedies.

The article was mainly gives a background on the Paya people, how they are changing, and how the food system is set up. In 1993 there was a plan for a highway to go through the Paya territory; it would cut it directly in half. On top of that the land is being taken away by deforestation and population growth of non-Payas. Each house is set up to have a garden with fruit trees, gourds, medicinal herbs, and chili peppers which are a necessity in Paya cooking. Some of the medical herbs grown in almost all of the gardens are Tagetes erecta, buddleia americana, and ginger. In the appendix there is a list of all the plants and their medicinal uses from the Paya.

With all of the claims of modern medicine I become skeptical of what really helps. What part of the medicine fixes the problem, which hinders, and which is a placebo? For this reason I find the examination of plants through non modernized peoples to be really interesting because you don't use something that doesn't work. Therefore, there must be something in these plants that we can find, use, and capture to benefit humanity. Perhaps there is something in mangoes...