Richard Schultes Interview (page: 8 / 8) The Father of Modern Ethnobotany	Print Interview

When you were growing up, when you were a grade school kid, what kind of books did you read that influenced you?

Richard Schultes: I didn't go to school for a year. I had something wrong with my digestion. I couldn't keep anything on my stomach. I remember this old doctor. He said I had "stomach poisoning" - the old doctors, you know! Now my wife says I have a cast-iron stomach, and anyone who could live on the diet of the Amazon, it must be OK now. But in that year, my father and my mother went to the library and brought books out for me. And read to me. I could read a little, but they did most of the reading.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. One of the books was made by Wallace, on the exploits -- the botanical exploits -- of Richard Spruce, the only other botanist who had been in my area of the Amazon. I loved this book. I don't say that this had anything to do with my going to the Amazon, but I think it did when I went to school and got so that I could read. I always went to the public library and tried to get books on travel. I think it did that, but I can't say that Richard Spruce, who is my great hero now, and I go to England almost every year and have gone to his little house where he, after 14 years in South America, he went home and lived 22 years writing up his notes in a little hamlet in Northern England, in Yorkshire. And, I have been able to raise money to put a plaque on his little house on the estate.

A wonderful man. But, I do think that my father and mother reading from that, and I looking at the pictures in it that he drew, interested me in reading travel books. But, I never knew that I'd be going into Richard Spruce's country until I actually went into it.

Has your work given you concerns about conservation or about the environment?

Richard Schultes: Yes, very much so. Brazil is destroying an area every year larger than Switzerland. They think the Amazon is endless. Colombia is not suffering from this anti-conservation craze for several reasons.

My concern is that there are many plants, especially localized plants that are becoming extinct before we even know the names of these plants, or give them names, much less before we analyze and see if they are useful for any purpose. And this is going on not only in Brazil, but in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Borneo, places like that. I've been to Malaysia and I went to Sabah, a part of Borneo, and the devastation to plants, oil palms, is tremendous there - a whole million acres at a time.

I recently had to go to Brazil with a group of Canadians who were making a documentary on rubber. They wanted to see rubber tapping in Brazil. They didn't know Portuguese; they didn't know how to get all this equipment around in the jungle, so they asked me to go. We went to Manaus, and I hired a plane to go up to a place where I knew they were tapping. This should have taken us twenty or twenty-five minutes. But this was the end of the six-month dry season, when they come in with bulldozers, flatten the forest, let it dry, and then they set fire to it. We passed 17 fires. Four of them were at least a million acres large! So much so that the pilot was afraid to over them, as high as he could get! He had to go around them! It took us forty minutes to get there.

So, why the fires? In a word: cattle. You see, in Brazil the rivers are wide and navigable. They can bring in bulldozers and all sorts of equipment, and flatten every stick in one million acres, planting grass for cattle. Now in that soil and climate, grass will not grow more than two or possibly three years. Then they move the cattle to another million acres. But what we call the "climax forest" -- the original forest -- will never take over such a large cleared area. It will be scrub vegetation only.

How much danger is the planet in?

Richard Schultes: I think it's in great danger. I think it's in great danger from the disruption of the forests, and the many effects that we are just still discovering that come from that. You see, the amount of pollution that our big cities in Europe and the United States put out cannot be purified by the temperate forests. They are working photosynthetically only a few months a year. Then they can't do anything. They don't breathe. They don't take in carbon dioxide and put out oxygen. We need the dense tropical forests with many more trees per acre. This pollution is blown all over the earth with the winds and it is purified by these great concentrations of green plants twelve months a year. There is a great difference.

And that's not only in Europe and the United States. For example, let's take Brazil. The Brazilians say, "That's a problem for you people." It's a problem for Brazil itself! Not only are they ruining the future of much of the Amazon, but one of the most polluted cities in the world is Sào Paulo.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. You can hardly breathe in Sào Paulo; I've been there. And the Brazilians themselves should recognize this. No true conservationist believes that you should build a fence around the Amazon, keep people out, and make it a living museum. That's not conservation. But, a million acres at a time should never be allowed to be destroyed until studies of that have been made by a variety of different scientists, local or foreign, or both. And, the rate this is going, it's a great danger.

But the basic thing, as far as destruction of the forest goes, is control of the tremendously galloping population. Some have said the scientists have always increased production. There is a limit to that. We know that there is a limit not only from the destruction of the soil, but a biological limit of how much you can improve production by breeding different plants. Right now we find it difficult to feed the populations of the world in some of the densely populated, poorer nations. Partly because of distribution, but also because there isn't enough food, and it's going to be worse if we continue.

What has your personal life been like, with all the time you've spent in the field and on research trips? Have you been able to balance your personal life with your professional life?

Richard Schultes: I think I have. My wife and I have three children, first a boy, and a year and a half later, boy and girl twins. We have had no problems with them. Which, I think, is saying something today. We have been a very close family. I'd say a conservative, old-fashioned type family. And fortunately, they are all nearby.

I have one last question to ask. We are going to get a look at this blowgun that you have. Can you tell me what is the story behind this blowgun? Where did you get it?

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Richard Schultes: Blowguns are used in most of the Amazon, especially in the western Amazon with poisoned darts. The natives hunt with them. They make many different kinds of curare, arrow poisons, from many different plants. They blow these little darts from these six or eight foot tubes that they make. They can shoot birds on the top of a 100-foot tree. And, they are very accurate. And not only that, of course. Some of the monkeys are very good eating! They go along in bands, and if they used a shotgun and missed, all the monkeys would be a mile away. If they miss with a blowgun, it's silent. If it hits its mark, it doesn't kill immediately. It relaxes the muscles so much that the monkey loses his grip and falls down, then they club him and he's dead. And, the other monkeys say, "What a damn fool, you can't hold on!" And then they get a second monkey. If they used a noisy firearm, the monkeys would be away. So, from that point of view it's wonderful. The thing that I found intriguing was how they run through the forest with these eight or nine foot, big things.

Now, as to this business of my blowgun, one of my lectures in this course was on poisons. I did this the first time, at the end of my lecture. I said, "Now that I have lectured about this curare business, I want to show you how the natives hunt." They put a cardboard box with a circle in it, and I was able, almost always, to hit the red mark in the middle, even though the thing, being horizontal, was not steady. After that, everybody who comes here wants me to do that! It's become famous, that wonderful blow gun!

Well you were also wonderful, and we thank you.

Thanks.

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