Barnabas Seyler
Description: Barnabas Seyler is a researcher of public horticulture and ethnobotany in Chengdu, China. His research focuses on the positive effects of urban green spaces on human health as well as identifying and understanding plants through local cultures. In this episode we discuss urban greening and how environmental education improves urban communities’ relationships with nature. Barnabas highlights the importance of ethnobotany, and how researching plants with native communities can shed light on new applications from food to medicine.
Websites:
Publications:
Air pollution reduction in China: Recent success but great challenge for the future
Theories and Major Hypotheses in Ethnobotany
Resources:
Show Notes:
[0:00] Introduction and Background
[1:04] Early Interest in Plants and Education Path
[3:52] Transition to Urban Forestry and Urban Greening
[7:30] City Focus on Building Green Spaces
[15:57] Challenges in Perception of Horticulture Jobs
[17:10] Quality Definition of Green Spaces in Chengdu
[25:05] Awareness of Plant Blindness and Nature-Deficit Disorder
[30:06] Exploring Ethnobotany and Cultural Plant Uses
[34:31] Tibetan Buddhist Conservation Approach Study
[35:50] Reincarnation and Buddhist dietary practices
[37:07] Tibetan Buddhist traditions and aquatic animal conservation
[40:10] Orchid harvest impacts and artificial propagation efforts
[47:52] Maintaining biodiversity in traditional regions
[50:02] Economic influences on plant harvesting practices
[54:08] Impact of population shifts on biodiversity
[56:55] Challenges in preserving traditional food cultivation
[58:30] Cultural significance of the Yi people and their knowledge
[1:01:45] Economic impact of orchid overharvesting
[1:06:43] Utilizing germplasm banks for biodiversity restoration
[1:07:59] Involving younger generations in traditional knowledge and research
Unedited AI Generated Transcript:
Brent:
[0:56] Welcome, Dr. Seiler. Thank you for coming on today.
Barnabas:
[1:03] Hello.
Keller:
[1:04] We'd love to start off with your background. What got you interested in public horticulture and ethnobotany and how you ended up in Chengdu?
Barnabas:
[1:11] Okay. Interesting questions. So I kind of was interested in plants since I was in high school. And I worked at a nature center kind of as a volunteer. And I had a high school part-time job working at a nursery. And I kind of started to realize what I most liked about plants was teaching people about them or connecting people with plants in the natural world. So I went to the University of Delaware and got my undergrad degrees. I started with horticulture, a bachelor of science, and I later added a bachelor of arts in East Asian studies because I kind of fell in love with the Chinese language at that time because I had a lot of elective opportunities to study Chinese, and I did. And then I studied abroad in Beijing Normal University when I was an undergrad, and I fell in love with China. So that's kind of how it started. And then for my master's, I went on at the University of Delaware. There was a collaboration with Longwood Gardens. And if anybody knows the Philadelphia area, everybody will know Longwood Gardens. If you haven't been there, you should go there one day. It's one of the best, most respected gardens, public horticulture institutions in the world. And that's where I got my master's in public horticulture administration.
Barnabas:
[2:31] And then after that, I went to the University of Hawaii because I was studying public horticulture, which is kind of connecting people to plants in the kind of after understanding plants way. But then ethnobotany is kind of the opposite, where you're studying how local cultures became connected to plants. And that's what I was studying in my PhD, ethnobotany. And if you look into the literature about ethnobotany, it has a lot of different kind of research focuses that's multifaceted. What I did in my research was to come to China and understand how species extinction, local extinction of orchids in the local culture where they were historically very important, how that negatively impacts the knowledge and therefore the culture. So that's why I did my PhD in understanding how over-collection, over-harvest, and eventual extinction in a local community causes the culture to be negatively affected. That's what I did my PhD in here in Sichuan and then I continued, keeping good contact with the folks i met while i was here and then i later
Barnabas:
[3:47] got hired on as a postdoc at sichuan university and that's uh kind of where we are now.
Brent:
[3:53] Yeah and i know we're gonna go back and talk about your phd a little bit later too but we wanted to focus at the beginning part on the urban forestry and urban greening and could you just talk about what that is and how you're trying to solve that issue here, like urbanizing China.
Barnabas:
[4:15] Okay. So probably most of your listeners will understand that China is among the most rapidly urbanized countries in the history of the world. In the last 20, 30 years, China has moved rapidly from an overwhelmingly agricultural agrarian society to now a majority urban. So countries like the U.S. that had been urban for almost 100 years, China has now become urban in just a period of 20 to 30 years. So with urbanization, there's a lot of benefits. People are living more densely together, so infrastructure like hospitals and schools are more easy to access. But there's also negative impact on the psychology. Ecology, when you live close together where you don't see plants in the natural world, it has negative impacts in terms of, of course, pollution, different kinds of pollution, light pollution, air pollution, water pollution.
Barnabas:
[5:19] Public horticulture and public greening, urban greening, is very important for a lot of those reasons. For example, there have been studies in terms of public health where elderly people in hospitals who are looking outside a window where there's a building will recover at a slower pace than those who look outside the window and see trees or garden. And the ability to walk when you're rehabilitating, walk in a garden, a green space, helps people recover quicker. And also for For children with learning disabilities or attention difficulties, they tend to be more easy to grasp deeper concepts when they have access to green spaces. Not just going outside and running around in a concrete jungle, but actually having access to plants. So in the U.S., there have been a lot of research on that in terms of how bringing plants in the urban area can help with some of these problems. And some cities in China have been kind of at the forefront of that. Like Shanghai is one of the cities that does that very well. But also here in Chengdu, the city government has focused on building green spaces across the city to kind of make it more equitable. so everybody has access not just in certain regions but everywhere is.
Brent:
[6:47] That like a government focus of building green spaces everywhere for equity reasons.
Barnabas:
[6:52] In Chengdu not not just equity reasons but because it was the goal kind of to be kind of like Singapore is the is known as the garden city Chengdu wanted to become the park city of the world and have so many parks that you kind of think of them as ubiquitous and when they first started building parks it was a goal of the city government, but now it's been recognized as a national government as a priority because it was done so well here. So the city's very proud. Even the president of China, when he came, he said Chengdu is China's park city.
Barnabas:
[7:26] So it's now got that moniker. They're proud of that. And the green spaces, they were starting kind of with historic green spaces that were kind of parks that were already here and then kind of building out from there. But now they're They're kind of tearing up cement areas and replacing like sections next to streets or sections next to waterways with parks. So it's really easy. Even like bike lanes now. They had a goal to have bike lanes entirely surrounding the city in what's called the Green Belt.
Brent:
[8:05] Okay.
Barnabas:
[8:05] And have people provide citizens with the ability to bike from one side of the city to the other. And it's actually kind of impressive on the citywide scale how effective it has been. But kind of along with that, there's kind of a cultural belief. And it's not just in China. It's in many cultures that kind of if you study plants, study horticulture, you're kind of going to get a bottom rung kind of a job. Job like you're just going to mow the grass so you're just going to kind of like sanitary worker you know how the perception that's really good job a lot of people are very proud for their hard work but the kind of social view of this kind of a job is very low so there's a lot of kind of difficulty that cities like chengdu or botanical gardens in china have to get educated employees because Because a lot of Chinese don't want to study that in college. Their parents want them to study something that is seen as higher status or would more likely get a more lucrative income.
Barnabas:
[9:12] So with that said, there's a lot of maybe management problems with gardens that need to be addressed through research. So before someone, especially as an outsider coming to a culture, before being quick to criticize, it's good to actually do research, actually see that the problem is there in the data. So that's kind of one of the reasons why I've been focusing on urban greening and public horticulture research in China, because of my background in the US with public horticulture training, I kind of see some problems that may get worse over time if they're not addressed. And it's helpful to have people with different backgrounds come to the table to help improve the situation. So that's kind of one of the kind of goals I've had with my research is to help people see the potential value of this as a profession.
Barnabas:
[10:11] In the U.S., for example, certain industries like just mulching, mulching is a multi-billion dollar industry just in the U.S. But that doesn't really exist in China. The idea of mulching is kind of green mulch, where you plant plants densely together so they cover the soil. You don't really see the wood chips or the compost applied on top of the soil to retain moisture and temperature and soil nutrition. That's not really recognized. It's starting to be, so even in Chengdu now, you can see some gardens with mulch, but it's kind of more for aesthetic reasons. Like they have maybe a landscape designer that says you should add mulch, but they don't really understand why. Like that's not widely understood by the general public.
Barnabas:
[11:05] That's kind of an area where there's a lot of potential economic growth in China because that horticulture profession is still kind of at the very beginning of development. Other areas of the economy have already been developed, and that's a potential area for growth. So if there's any young people out there who want to move to China and start a business, that potentially could have some promising return, especially if you have local contacts.
Keller:
[11:33] So could you give us a breakdown of a couple of the different types of green spaces that are in cities.
Barnabas:
[11:37] Okay so uh in kind of most people's perception there's just parks right so like in new york there's central park uh there's also kind of kind of smaller scale parks like where they may be like a baseball or basketball court a baseball field or basketball court or maybe tennis facilities. But those usually are kind of municipally managed, like municipal parks. And there's like recreational parks and then there's green space kind of parks. In China, that's increasingly recognized as important to plan in a lot of cities. Some cities like Shanghai have been doing that for a long time and Chengdu as well. But there's also different kinds of what could be seen as green spaces, which are just kind of trees that naturally grow. They may be growing in kind of abandoned lots or natural areas that kind of are still remnant. And there's also trees.
Barnabas:
[12:46] Purposely planted gardens they could be botanical gardens or uh a nature reserve of some sort that's kind of uh planted to look pretty like there's a lot of uh riparian areas or floodplain areas that are kind of planted because you know they're flood areas so they're planted um but also in china there's uh what they're called xiaochu which is basically like a residential community community, kind of like a development in the U.S. It's like a lot of homes that are built about the same time. So they usually in China are planted as green spaces, each Xiaoju, especially the newer ones that are larger. They may have like 15 high-rise buildings, but in the middle, there's like a common area that's planted as a green space. And Chengdu in particular, the government has really focused effort to make green spaces of high quality in and outside of public areas so not just along the street or in parks but also in the residential communities so that there's green space everywhere yeah and that's kind of where when it's part of the government goal of increasing green space access you have a lot more kind of cohesiveness yeah.
Brent:
[14:09] And then we were just in singapore singapore has a ton of like plants built into the buildings it almost feels like.
Barnabas:
[14:17] Would you.
Brent:
[14:18] Qualify like those as green spaces or.
Barnabas:
[14:20] Yeah that's uh vertical horticulture singapore is kind of at the cutting edge of that yeah they've developed a lot of that technology and and the kind of the sustainable processes necessary to support that. Cause what you think about a lot of times if you're irrigating plants on infrastructure, like a building, can damage the building like leaks uh depending on which side of the building it could be overexposure so that the actual support for the plants can get too much damage from the environment and can deteriorate quickly so singapore has done a lot of research on that in china that's not actually as common yet yeah i feel like it should be.
Brent:
[15:04] With the amount of high rises here.
Barnabas:
[15:06] They do that a little bit but it's kind of hard to do well and the rapid pace of urbanization in the past kind of the goal was to build quickly so we have homes for people especially as people are resettled from rural areas into more like concentrated communities but the um kind of building time frame was to have the buildings last for about 30 40 years and then they would rebuild them like.
Brent:
[15:33] Completely tear down the high rising.
Barnabas:
[15:34] Yeah and that's kind of the the goal like traditionally, because that would provide more jobs and that's kind of the traditional mindset. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just a different way of thinking. But now the idea is it's actually better not to do that, to actually have buildings that last. And there's still need for more research to do high rises with green spaces
Barnabas:
[15:54] that are sustainable and won't leak. I know a couple of high rises that do have green spaces on the roof and they constantly leak into that's kind of why this there's some regulations against having green spaces on the roof because the leaks yeah.
Brent:
[16:10] Does it have any benefit for the buildings for like air conditioning or any purposes.
Barnabas:
[16:15] Like that well yeah because the the evapotranspiration the plants provide and also the shade uh significantly cools the building uh but then like the the the building needs to be, with the ability to support that load of weight, trees can be very heavy when they're full grown. And when a green space is planted well, you want full grown trees. You don't want to have to constantly cut them back. So that's one area that more work can be done to improve. But that's something that requires a lot of research and economic investment.
Keller:
[16:58] Then you mentioned that the city of Chengdu is trying to have high-quality green spaces. How is quality defined? Is it climate readiness, access for people, sustainability?
Keller:
[17:07] What are some of the things that they're looking for when they're making a green space?
Barnabas:
[17:10] You mean the high quality in the city's perspective or as just a random visitor?
Keller:
[17:16] Yeah, in the city's perspective. What are they trying to focus on?
Barnabas:
[17:19] I think in general, the original goal was just to have more of it. Because if you look at satellite images 20 years ago, the downtown area of Chengdu, the five urban core districts, were very bleak, very little green space. And the outside, especially outside the Second Ring Road, was very rural and agrarian still. But now, today, it's kind of more opposite. Is it like they've been planting a lot in the downtown area and as the more rural areas have developed they're now kind of more uniform in the green space so the quality originally was just to have more of it but now a lot of the um realization that uh there's a concept in china called sponge city it's it's similar to concepts in other countries as well but the idea is that the city The city itself should be built so that water can infiltrate and percolate into the soil, not just run into the runoff, the stormwater kind of runoff areas, and slowing down the speed of water flow. And as cities have developed, you know every urban building or bridge or road will cause water to run quickly off of it.
Brent:
[18:45] Yeah.
Barnabas:
[18:45] But that actually causes long-term damage because the water is not percolating into the groundwater. It's not because the ground actually cleans the water, right? When it percolates, it's actually cleaned through the soil. By the time it gets to the aquifer, it's actually usually pretty clean. If it's running quickly, it just takes all the pollution with it and takes the pollution all the way into the rivers and can make the problem worse. But even the speed of water movement can cause erosion and danger, like when floods happen. There have been floods in cities where it goes above where the bridges are, right? So, it can be dangerous if the water moves too quickly. but in um in chengdu the uh the the goal has been to add more uh green spaces in keeping with the sponge city concept where the actual city itself is like a sponge to absorb as much water as possible so like there were rivers most of the rivers in downtown area were cement base like they were cemented yeah just kind of you see that in california too right the.
Brent:
[19:58] Center river right near our house.
Barnabas:
[19:59] Now they're tearing up at least not maybe not the channel part the very bottom but they're tearing up the side areas to plant gardens now i mean we could i could even take you to some of the in the last five years they've done that a lot even where i near where i live where they've taken cement areas and made them gardens and it's to look pretty the the public enjoys it even when they don't understand maybe the benefits to the ecosystem or the benefits to their own health but the the other goal is to actually slow down the movement of water to help it percolate into the soil and that's one one idea a lot of cities kind of are called um are they recognize the importance of sponge city concept but i don't think other cities have invested as as much into that as chengdu has okay and also there's an idea of forest city which is is also an important thing. Sort of like all cities in China are kind of competing with each other to kind of be the best at something. And that's a good thing, right? Competition is good. But in, In the Chinese, there's a list of cities that are recognized as forest cities.
Brent:
[21:12] Yeah.
Barnabas:
[21:13] And I think they have 33% or more of the city as being forested. But the way some cities have reached that is to, what's the term? They take control of rural areas. So they increase the footprint of the city by um taking over a rural county and then that's where the the forest park comes from oh and that's how some i mean it is part i mean like that's kind of peri-urban area and most cities have that right even new york or san francisco well maybe not san francisco new york los angeles still do have some more rural areas part of the city like staten island would be that in new york right that's like more rural i mean it's more residential communities now but in the in the idea of uh chengdu the city has focused a lot on actually planting in the downtown area not just taking over rural areas yeah that makes sense i'll.
Keller:
[22:18] Try to find the there's one city that when you're looking at places to go in china that i think was a forest city i think it was like luizong or something.
Barnabas:
[22:25] Lujo lujo.
Keller:
[22:27] Maybe it's outside of like further west of Guilin. Guilin.
Barnabas:
[22:32] Lu Zhao Ma. 它说一个森林城市,在桂林的西边的一个方向,西方向。.
Keller:
[22:50] There's hundreds of them.
Barnabas:
[22:52] I'm saying a lot of them reach the forest city standard by, I can't remember the English term. When I moved here, my English has kind of fallen back a little bit. It my chinese is really good now but uh you know they like cities in california and texas they do that right they take over a smaller municipality and then that increases the footprint of the larger city yeah it's the same kind of concept yeah.
Brent:
[23:16] So i think we like covered a lot of the benefits of urban greening what are you doing to educate the population here about how to the importance and how to properly go about greening our urban environments.
Barnabas:
[23:30] Well uh there's kind of two ways of looking at it uh me as one person being a foreigner i don't necessarily have the platform necessary to educate the broader public but i'm a teacher and teaching young people allows uh more people to be aware of it because parents in china are very focused on their children's education, they know a lot about what their children are studying because they care about their children being successful. And if something's not working for their child at school, the parents are the first to show up to ask why.
Barnabas:
[24:02] That's good and bad, right? And we understand that in any kind of schooling. But because of that, if the children are passionate about something, if they really enjoy a class, if they find some new concept that they really find interesting, thing they share with their parents. And because of that, I've seen a lot of people increasingly understand these concepts we've been talking about just because I take students out and we go on field trips and we talk about this and we talk about them in class and outside of class. So teaching is very important. And also research, because research provides the data that then you can show people the benefits or the problems and not just convince academics and educated people, but also non-academics and the local people, and also those who make decisions like the government. If they see data, it's more easy to justify an investment to maybe change some processes that have been going on that may not be as effective.
Barnabas:
[25:04] So, that's kind of how I see it.
Keller:
[25:06] And what are some of those problems related to the environment? And the two we had noted were plant blindness and nature-deficient disorder.
Barnabas:
[25:15] Yeah, nature-deficit disorder. So, plant blindness was first coined by biology teachers. They were high school teachers, actually, in the U.S. who noticed that their students were more interested in animals than they were plants.
Barnabas:
[25:34] They always thought of plants just being green backdrop. They didn't really focus on the species of plants. They could show them maybe 10 different random animal pictures from around the world, foreign exotic animals, and the average child could easily tell what that was. It's an African lion. It's an Asian elephant. They can even say the difference between camels, right? But they couldn't recognize the plants that are growing in their backyard. They couldn't recognize that there were differences in plants. So, plant blindness was a concept that they coined to kind of refer to the idea that humans are more interested generally in animals than plants. Although recently kind of the published literature kind of there's some who argue we shouldn't call it plant blindness because that kind of puts a negative connotation on blindness so it should maybe potentially have a different name but the the idea is that in general most people prefer animals over plants and you see that even when in the past most schools most universities especially especially in the US, had botany departments and animal science departments.
Barnabas:
[26:50] But one by one, they've dropped the plant focus and just incorporated a biology focus. And the majority of the biology students are either pre-med or veterinarian science. They're not interested in plants. So as universities have gotten rid of plant science or botany majors, there's less interest in plants in general. And that's a shame. So that's kind of the concept of plant blindness. And I do, with my students, I do kind of these experiments, just randomly showing pictures.
Barnabas:
[27:24] Like there's an animal, you guys may have seen when you went to the panda base, there's an animal called the red panda or the little panda. And they're kind of like red raccoons. They act like raccoons. They're actually not that far in terms of relation, but they they're very adorable and they like to hang out on trees they like to walk in front of you when we're walking down the path so i have all these pictures of red pandas i kind of pop in to my powerpoint slides and the students love seeing them and then i always show them pictures like what is this what do you see in this picture and they always say it was red panda.
Barnabas:
[27:59] Anything else? It was like the red panda is sleeping or the red panda is yawning. They're always talking about the panda, but they don't even notice the other plants. Even when I kind of give them a leading question, like, is there anything else in this photo? Maybe of 30 students, only one. So it's sitting on a tree branch, but they can't recognize even when the photo has clear image of the tree leaves, which are very distinctive, they won't know it. And that's kind That's a problem in the future because there would be no animals if there's no plants. Plants are primary producers. The plants are providing all other energy in other organisms. So, I would say it this way. Traditional cultures, traditional societies had mechanisms to teach young people local plants. They had mechanisms to teach them through cultural ceremonies, through guided walks or tours. They had very many mechanisms to teach plants to young people. But as societies have urbanized, this has happened in the U.S. And other Western countries, but also here in China, the local people get less and less connected to plants and less and less aware of their importance.
Barnabas:
[29:20] And there was a, I'm not going to say which province, but there was a botanical garden in a major city in a different province that the botanical garden didn't really do good education, public education, explaining what they were doing. And because of that, the local government decided we don't need this garden here anymore, it'd be better to develop it, we have more high rises. So they just closed the garden. And it's kind of a shame because every city should have a botanical garden or more. Um education is very important if you don't teach people the importance of plants not only do they know the importance but then you're less likely to have um
Barnabas:
[30:00] recognition of the need for plant research and the need for all this other kind of infrastructure yeah.
Brent:
[30:07] And i think you started to touch on it there but could you define the term ethnobotany.
Barnabas:
[30:11] Oh okay so ethnobotany is what I got in my PhD. And ethnobotany is the study, the way I, so ethno is the study of culture and botany is the study of plants. So the way I describe it is kind of the study of how cultures use plants or appreciate plants or name plants.
Barnabas:
[30:33] And every culture has appreciation for plants, whether it's a majority culture, like here in China, the Han culture, or minority cultures. Here in China, there are 55 recognized minorities and even others that aren't recognized that are kind of minorities within minorities. So in other countries, like in the U.S., there are minority and majority cultures. Even in different states, the same ethnic group may have different cultures.
Barnabas:
[31:00] But every local culture has uses for plants. It could just be horticulture just for ornamental purposes it could be for food but um ethnobotany specifically studies the relationships between people and the plants and it's fascinating you can study the development of languages and i think who you're going to talk with tomorrow we'll go into more of that more detail with the language side but um studying how medicines are developed studying how foods are developed like for example a large percentage of foods are actually poisonous unless you prepare them properly like for example the um taro yeah which is in in hawaii right very important in hawaiian food culture and all more broadly the asia pacific region originated in mainland china And as the Polynesian diaspora extended throughout the Pacific, they took the tarot with them.
Barnabas:
[32:04] It's actually poisonous. That's why in Hawaiian food culture, they beat it. They pound it to make poi because the pounding process breaks up the calcium oxalate crystals that would cause asphyxiation potentially if you eat too much of it. And for children or animals in particular, it's more caustic. Usually people don't die from it, but it's not pleasant.
Barnabas:
[32:30] Other food cultures like here in China, they cook it at high temperatures. It breaks down on those crystals. But things like tapioca are poisonous. There's even cycads, the cycis revoluta, that's very important in certain food cultures in Micronesia. It's poisonous with neurotoxins. And a lot of the food plants that we depend on for the diversity of the foods that we eat are poisonous, have not prepared well. So the question is, how did local cultures first start eating poisonous plants? There are usually a reason for that. It could have been because of war or famine. There wasn't enough food. So the local people had to figure out a way of eating these poisonous plants. But once they learned how, they passed that down generation to generation. So next time there's a war or famine and local people don't know how to use the poisonous plants around them, they're more likely to starve. And that's what we've seen in cultures around the world. When a food culture is more and more dependent on a handful of crops, they're more in danger of a consequence when food supply is cut short. So that's why ethnobotany has so many interesting angles to study because local people are.
Barnabas:
[33:54] Local people know a lot about the plants, especially when urbanization hasn't separated them from that. So my interest in ethnobotany was because I was interested in how plants can be used to connect to people in the modern sense. And then understanding how traditional cultures have developed interest in plants, it's helpful to see the mechanisms that are helpful to help modern society as well. So there's many ways of looking at it. That's kind of where I am most interested in.
Brent:
[34:31] Yeah.
Keller:
[34:31] One of the examples we wanted to look into was the Tibetan Buddhist conservation approach in the Cholula region and kind of how they were doing that and what you learned about that that could be applied in more urban regions now.
Barnabas:
[34:44] Okay, so the study you're thinking about was a collaboration I did with a professor at Chengdu University, who was the first author of that. And she did a survey, it was a government program to survey kind of the biodiversity of different regions in China. So she was one of many who did this. But she really noticed while she was doing the biodiversity survey, some kind of interesting stories and anecdotes from the local people. So she went a little more in depth than she had to for the survey project and started interviewing people to document some of these stories. And in traditional tibetan buddhism like uh in han chinese buddhism there's uh in the idea that a devout buddhist would not eat meat because of the uh.
Barnabas:
[35:50] The cycle of life with reincarnation, a devout Buddhist would not eat meat, right? So if it's a Buddhist person who's eating meat, the local Buddhist would recognize them as not being devout, right? And in Tibetan Buddhism, they're allowed to eat meat. And it goes back to the history of how Tibetan Buddhism developed because in a high altitude area like that, there's not enough protein and carbohydrates in the Tibetan plateau in the flora without eating meat.
Barnabas:
[36:23] So the idea is that every life is equal. So if you're going to kill one, then it might just be as big as possible. So yaks, large animals would be preferred to kill because chicken will feed you for one meal, but a yak can feed you for an entire year. That's kind of an idiom that they have.
Barnabas:
[36:43] So for that reason, Tibetan Buddhists would not eat smaller animals, especially those who lived in water. And fish in particular, there's a saying that she documented that basically said, if you're eating a fish, it's kind of the worst you can do because they
Barnabas:
[37:05] don't have tongues to cry out in pain like other animals. So they're considered the most innocent of animal. so traditionally in tibetan plateau in the tibetan majority areas they wouldn't eat aquatic animals amphibians fish and for that reason they conserved highly but biodiverse lakes and rivers that in other areas uh they had already been over fished and that started to change now as the local Local people have kind of interacted more with outside cultures. They've kind of changed some of those habits. And there are certain practices that would occur, certain holy days where they would release animals that had been captured, especially for food, and they release them into the wild. So they may release goats or sheep or yaks into the wild.
Barnabas:
[38:00] But also fish because fish are considered the most innocent you can buy a fish from someone selling it in market and release it and then that's considered a way of acquiring merit and, But the problem is a lot of the fish being sold in local markets now are invasive. They're not native. They're not local to the ecosystem. So when they're released in the wild, it can actually harm the ecosystem. So it's an interesting kind of battle now because a lot of people think, oh, well, it's more pristine. It's more perfect if you preserve the local habitat. But because of interactions with outside markets and outside resources, the fish that traditionally would have been released would have been local fish. And now they're not. So it's actually had harmful effects.
Barnabas:
[38:54] And also, she found also that some people were waiting. Like, one of the major rivers that flows from this province south into a neighboring province, people on the other side, the border of the other province, would be waiting for all these fish to harvest them, to fish them out as soon as they're released. So it's kind of a lot of funny stories but for that reason like it's very interesting to understand the traditions how certain traditions were developed and why but also understand how modern uh changes are affecting those traditions because some of the traditions aren't necessarily beneficial if there's an outside influence that is changing the source right yeah so it's not Not just saying, oh, modern is bad and traditional is good. There's a balance. Even in traditional societies, a lot of local people don't necessarily know why they do things. They just do it out of tradition. But understanding the harm to the environment. And that's why the local government had been working with some of the lamas, the Buddhist priests, to try to educate local people not to release these kinds of fish. And also trying to limit the kinds of kind of...
Barnabas:
[40:10] Pressure to harvest local endangered fish just so they can be released so there's like two ways yeah and the previous research i had done with orchids the same thing was happening like there's places in in other provinces that had orchid festivals where they would go out and harvest orchids just for the festival but that actually hurt the the local biodiversity because they would harvest for the festival and then that would take it from the natural environment so Oh.
Brent:
[40:39] And that was part of the Han Chinese culture.
Barnabas:
[40:44] Uh, that the research I did was with Han Chinese, but what I'm thinking of is particularly was not, it was a minority, minority area that had the festival, but because of tourists coming, including Han Chinese from other provinces, uh, there was pressure to harvest these endangered orchids just to feed the demand of the tourists. And of course, if you buy an orchid and don't know how to care for it, it's better left in the wild. Right.
Brent:
[41:09] Yeah. So what would be the better practice there? Would it be like just to grow orchids for the festival itself or like, how would you like?
Barnabas:
[41:19] That's why first you have to understand what the local harvesting pressures are caused by. Is it for a festival or is it because they heard this is an available orchid? They can sell it for a high price. You have to first do the preliminary understanding and understand what's going on. And then there was a study, uh, five, six years ago, the first authors named Luo from Beijing, that study was looking how there was a need to artificially propagate orchids so that the demand for orchid would be filled without necessarily having to harvest from the wild. But there's also, like, some orchids are valuable for medicine, And some orchids are valuable for horticulture, just for the ornamental purpose. And it depends on the genus and also to a degree the species.
Barnabas:
[42:20] Certain genera like dendrobium is very valuable for medicine, specifically certain species. And a lot of Chinese traditional medicine uses dendrobium. So there has been a lot of research recently to try to artificially propagate those. But the belief is it's still from a traditional medicine point of view the wild collected orchids are more valuable because they have higher concentrations of the bioactive compounds and.
Brent:
[42:50] That's like scientifically backed up.
Barnabas:
[42:52] It's a perception okay it's not necessarily the science it's a perception and like for example that there was traditional understanding like in here in In Sichuan, the orchids and other medicinal plants, Paris is another one. There's a plant called Paris.
Barnabas:
[43:14] And Fritillaria, there's other plants that were used for traditional Chinese medicine, still are used for traditional Chinese medicine. Historically, in ancient China, the perception was certain regions in China had better quality, more bioactive effects because of the microclimate or the local climate where they were growing. And that has been proven the case. Like Sichuan, some of the plants growing higher elevations in colder climates actually affects their bioactivity. So more research is necessary in that regard but the there have been efforts to propagate these orchids and then grow them in semi-natural settings so they're not uh they're not wild collected but they are cultivated in a semi-wild way and that has shown promise also there's another orchid called gastrodia gastrodia lata which kind of looks like a a potato you can see them all over chengdu they look like little shriveled potatoes and they are a parasitic orchid that is, let me think, is it technically parasitic?
Barnabas:
[44:32] Because it has a association with fungus. I think it's not technically parasitic. It has an association with the fungus, and it's through the fungus that they get their nutrition. So they don't really have leaves. The flower spike comes from this potato little thing. And it's kind of an odd-looking flower. It's not as showy as a lot of orchids, but it's quite pretty. But it was best the quality was best historically in higher elevations like yunnan and and sichuan where the center of diversity was so this was driving this species to extinction local extinction in many areas because people were every time was in flower it's good time to dig up these potatoes right they're not potatoes but they look like they're tubers are.
Brent:
[45:23] They eating like potatoes does.
Barnabas:
[45:24] Yeah they can be okay but there's a lot of soups that they make with them that have the medicinal effect they call it yang which is kind of caring for your body it's kind of a traditional chinese concept so you things like uh goji berries yeah uh goji are um used in the same way kind of as medicinal and adding you know some of the the they call tian ma in chinese is the gastrodia so the gastrodia a lot of were being over harvested and then a lot of research was done to try to propagate them artificially and now it's totally not over harvested because.
Barnabas:
[46:07] It's harder to hike up to where they're locally growing and dig them out when they're in flower than it is just to propagate them artificially but the research had to be done on how to because of that symbiotic relationship with the fungus it was kind of initially a little bit difficult there was a german researcher his name was perner holger perner he's since passed away but he started a research company here in sichuan to develop techniques to propagate these endangered orchids and it's very successful it still continues even now after he's passed away but if anybody knows orchids they probably know who holger perner was he was very successful in helping to mitigate some of these over-harvest pressures with orchids. But there's so many different orchids in China. China has the highest temperate orchid species diversity of anywhere in the world. A lot of people think of Malaysia or Colombia as orchid central. It's true. In terms of tropical orchids, Southeast Asia and tropical America are very highly biodiverse. But in temperate species, those especially temperate species tend to be the ones that grow in the ground. like cymbidium orchids.
Barnabas:
[47:23] Uh the more tropical ones tend to be epiphytes growing on trees and the uh terrestrial orchids like blotilla and cymbidium gastrodia are in the ground and china is the center of diversity in the world for for terrestrial orchids specifically temperate as well but also subtropical well and And that's kind of what first drew me here to stay, because it's so cool, the orchids.
Barnabas:
[47:53] But now I've kind of shifted gears, and now I'm not doing as much with the orchid research. But it's still, you can look in my house, we still have a lot of orchids here.
Keller:
[48:03] What are some of the other ways that people are trying to maintain biodiversity in these regions, when they have really specific plants that are of high value, especially with the medicine? And is it you know other ways outside of the artificial propagation to still get that same quality without affecting the biodiversity of the area.
Barnabas:
[48:20] So the how should i say the main problem is economic so if people are poor impoverished and struggling to put food on the table then they're They're more likely to not really care about the environment, right? In countries that are poor, they're less likely to care about the environment. But there's a concept called the Kuznets curve.
Barnabas:
[48:49] Have you heard of that? It's an economic term. As a country is developing, they don't care about the environment. Like London was that way. England was that way during the Industrial Revolution. So was the United States. China was that way, but it's now reaching the kind of top of the Kuznets curve. And now, as the country becomes wealthier, they no longer want to hurt the environment. They want to spend money to restore it. So it's almost like you have to pay more money after developing to restore the damage that was caused. So China's largely reached that in the consciousness of at least urban people. And rural people now, because a lot of people are leaving their rural areas and moving to cities, it's actually relieving some of the pressures on the rural areas, the economic burden and the ecological burden. Cause the populations are declining in the rural areas and they're all moving to the big cities. The ecological footprint of the cities are increasing the green footprint, right? Like you have to have much more land to support a city of 20 million than you do a province of 20 million, right?
Barnabas:
[49:54] As people are concentrated in one area, then they increase the burden just where
Barnabas:
[49:59] they're living, but it relieves the burden on rural areas. So in China, a lot of these kind of price speculation problems where these rare plants are very valuable was maybe 20 years ago was at its peak because a lot of people were still very poor, and this was their main way of getting money. But now that it's no longer the case, there's many more economic opportunities. A lot of people are less likely to harvest, especially when they know it's illegal. But it's still kind of not completely there yet. There's still a lot of economic burden. But I think it's not just, well, your question was how, besides the artificial propagation, what can we do? I think the economic development is very necessary. Because you can't tell people not to do something that's putting food on the table if there's no other option. So that's why policies need to follow the economic reality. And in that sense, China's kind of starting to reach the top of the Kuznets curve and is now focusing a lot of resources into fixing those problems.
Brent:
[51:18] Yeah, we saw that firsthand near Guilin when we went to a rural village and to meet a professor there who's part of a revitalization program that's a part of a national program that this town applied for and won. And they're doing all their agriculture just organic no pesticides and they're really caring a lot about doing multiple different plants and setting up a very sustainable program yeah and it was amazing they said like the whole town is much happier and better off now and one of the students when i was texting them on wechat so yeah the national program started started because the nation has now reached a certain level of economic like stability that the local people aren't like struggling as much for food so now they can go back and revitalize these like agrarian and.
Barnabas:
[52:11] It's not just food it's also like education.
Brent:
[52:14] Yeah like.
Barnabas:
[52:15] The recognition of education in China is very important has been kind of, millennia old but it wasn't until recent decades that the idea that the average person should be educated not just the most elite should be educated the most talented the now everybody the goal is that everybody should be educated everybody can read and write like it wasn't until recently that the majority could read and write so that's really helped because if you have more economic opportunities you can move and go to another place if there's more economic opportunities and if you have more uh education you can think of a new industry in your hometown that doesn't just depend on agriculture or tourism because tourism can be fickle we know that of course with covet right tourism industries have been devastated but um people's brain that's the most valuable resource the nation has educating people so that they can actually think of new industries.
Barnabas:
[53:16] Like everybody wants to be just like Silicon Valley, right? But Silicon Valley started with people's thinking of new ideas, not just mimicking what other people have done. So that's kind of where I think starting to happen. And also you see this like with cell phones, like people in rural areas, anywhere in China, anywhere in the world now have cell phones. So they're having the same access to a lot of these educational opportunities as other people would have to pay for tuition to get. And now that's really helped more people to be educated. But there's still kind of a pressure because like in Yunnan, there's a place called Honghe, which is a prefecture with the Hanyi people, Hanyi Zu.
Barnabas:
[53:59] And they have probably one of the oldest, if not the oldest terrorist rice patties in the world.
Barnabas:
[54:09] Uh more than 1500 years old and the honey people have been terracing there and maintaining these terraces for many many years and they're very highly biodiverse because the local ecology has kind of co-evolved with with these terraces wow so like between the terraces the there are like these edge areas that have a lot of woody plants and a lot of these woody plants have eco ecosystem system services that support different species of insects and other animals. And in the rice paddies themselves, there's a lot of aquatic animals and insects that live there. And this high biodiversity is now starting to be affected as people move away to cities. There's not enough manpower now to maintain these, and they're starting to go fallow and become wooded. And And the wooded areas are actually somewhat not as biodiverse as the original or more longer-term rice terraces were. And what's also interesting, it's kind of like a difficulty because some people have the mindset you just force the people to stay and keep them in that culture. But that's not really fair. You want them to be able to stay there if they want to, but not force them to stay there. So there's kind of a tension. how do we encourage the long-term preservation of these.
Barnabas:
[55:32] High labor intensive ecosystems that uh doesn't enslave the people require them to stay against their wishes because could you imagine if like oh all the walnuts walnut plantations in central valley in california you have to stay there and farm that whether you want to or not right or even in vineyards like everybody in sonoma county looks wonderful if you have a vineyard right but if you didn't want to you want to become a medical doctor and not be working on the vineyard then that should be your opportunity. So it's kind of a tension. How do we create an economic benefit to staying in this traditional lifestyle that doesn't force people into it so that they want to stay in there? Some do, but you have to have the population density to support it also. Because in actually these areas of the rice terraces, they have had population densities for millennia that are as dense as modern cities because of the number of people necessary to support that agricultural system. It could support a lot of population with the rice, but also it required a large population to maintain. But now as people are moving to cities, these places are starting to collapse.
Barnabas:
[56:46] And it's not just here in China, but other Asian countries are also facing similar challenges.
Brent:
[56:55] Yeah, we were in Indonesia, and one of the farmers was saying, like yeah this is the last person who farms this type of food in this whole region.
Barnabas:
[57:03] Yeah there's.
Brent:
[57:04] No like we are scared because we don't know what's going to happen after this and.
Barnabas:
[57:07] The un food and agriculture organization had a statistic that half of the world's food is just five crops more than half it is corn if i'm remember correctly it's corn soybean wheat rice and what was the other one, I can't remember. There's five of them.
Brent:
[57:29] Is it the sorghum? No.
Barnabas:
[57:31] So wheat, rice, corn, soybean. I can't remember. I can send it to you later. But there are thousands of edible plants. And local cultures who still live in the more traditional ecosystems still know this knowledge. But that knowledge passes away when one generation passes away if they don't transmit it. And if you don't know what's edible, like, for example, like the banana that the world ate about 100 years ago no longer exists. It had a pathogen that attacked and now it doesn't exist. But the current banana that we always get, like, you know, you may get in the U.S. and may have like a dull sticker on it. The banana is also now under attack. So bananas may no longer exist 20, 30 years from now based on how this disease
Barnabas:
[58:22] goes on. so if we're thinking of sustainable food systems local people have a lot to teach could.
Brent:
[58:30] You like speak more about that about the lee people specifically.
Barnabas:
[58:32] The e people e people e people y i yeah so their local language they call it themselves no so which means um well it's just their their language for themselves no means black and su means people so they it's because they have a high respect for black in their culture. So black clothing, a lot of their clothing is very dark. That's kind of where that came from. So they call themselves Mosul. And they are from kind of the center of their population is the very southern part of this province. There's about two and a half million Yi people in Sichuan, in Liangshan Prefecture. And then there's also significant populations in Yunnan province and Guizhou and a few other places, but mostly those three provinces.
Barnabas:
[59:22] They have a very unique culture, very different than other Chinese ethnic groups. Their language is related to the Nuwari people in Kathmandu in Nepal, and also to some ethnic groups in Myanmar and Burma in the Tibetan. You can talk more with Jesse tomorrow about it, but the Sino-Tibetan language family, it's the more Tibetan branch, the Tibeto-Burman language branch. ranch. They have a lot of knowledge about local foods and they use spices like the litsea.
Barnabas:
[1:00:00] Litsea is a tree that they scrape the root for a powder, a spice. And they're one of the few people who use that tree as a spice. And in Liangshan, even the Han people, the Han Chinese that live in Liangshan use that as a spice in their own food, but they learn that from the people and there's a lot of um like there's a plant you can see it in the u.s uh it's kind of an invasive species in the u.s it's hoitunia uh it's kind of kind of like got heart like heart shaped leaves and long rhizomes that are kind of whitish and i i remember growing it when i was in the in the u.s in maryland it was sold at garden centers but it kind of started taking over my my parents yard and I started pulling it up like really really long rhizomes really really long they're like ropes almost that's all over even under the the sod in the grass and it had this really noxious smell and I remember pulling it up in the garden and just like why did we plant this they had pretty flowers pretty leaves but it was taken over.
Barnabas:
[1:01:07] Then when I came to Liangshan and started researching among the Yip people, they were eating that plant. And I was surprised because it's the same smell as I was pulling up, kind of remembering on my hands. But they eat it and it's a vegetable. They eat it as a vegetable in a lot of their dishes and also as a condiment. They chop it and use it as a spice. And I started to have a new appreciation for this plant. And I was thinking, if in the U.S. We ate it like a vegetable, it probably wouldn't be as big of an invasive problem because it would be food rather than just taking over the garden.
Barnabas:
[1:01:45] So there's a lot of things I learned from the e-people. And actually, originally, when I was doing research, it was focused on the orchids that were being over-harvested for horticultural reasons, for ornamental horticultural reasons. They were being collected.
Barnabas:
[1:02:02] The wild orchids in Sichuan were considered among the most beautiful, especially wild collected orchids that had kind of odd shaped flowers or unique colors that were not typical of the species. And if it was a unique wild collected mutant strain, it could sell, when I was doing research, in the millions. Like there was the most expensive orchid that's been documented actually published in my paper it's 4.6 million yuan which at the time was uh 900 800 900 000 us dollars for one small meow well a little meow is a.
Barnabas:
[1:02:46] A little shoot, one little orchid plant, like a little tiny one. And I interviewed the people who found it and who, it was sold by the guy who found it to a collector in Yunnan province who drove up from Kunming and got it. And then the village realized the problem. So they collected the money together from their village to buy that same plant from the guy in Yunnan for 4.6 million.
Barnabas:
[1:03:16] And there may have been other orchids. About that time, orchid speculation was so rapid. There may have been more expensive orchids, but the documented one in published literature, I believe that to be the most expensive, 4.6 million renminbi at the time. And they re-bought this, and everyone who had a share in that purchase became multimillionaires, every single family. And I went in Huili, in the county in southern Sichuan, where they live. They're now very wealthy. They have invested in jewelry stores and car dealerships and different industries, agrochemical. There's lots of different industries that they're all in now, but they still have this appreciation for orchids because orchids were the reason why they're no longer poor farmers. That's how they value these orchids. And they still have an orchid association in that county based on the people who appreciate it. But when I was coming to Sichuan at that time, I was doing research comparing the impact on this over-harvest of orchids and the impact on the local culture. And the E people, it's the E minority prefecture. So they were the majority of the prefecture, but not necessarily a majority of each village or each County.
Barnabas:
[1:04:36] So I was looking at the Han people who had a high cultural value to these orchids historically, going back all the way to Confucius.
Barnabas:
[1:04:46] And to the Yi people who historically didn't have a high cultural value of these orchids, in their local conception, it was just grass. The leaves look like grass. And it wasn't until the Han people started going crazy and harvesting them and selling them that the local Yi people also started doing it. They would harvest them and sell them the same way. So I was able to do a comparison, kind of like the Yi people were the control because they didn't have a cultural reason to learn about the orchids. I was able to compare generations, three generation groups of Han and Yi people in these local villages to see how economics influenced the Yi people to learn about these orchids and how the overharvest and extinction negatively affected the Han people's knowledge about them. Because by comparing the generations, the elderly people in both ethnic groups the han people knew a lot about orchids and the e people did not because it wasn't important in their traditional culture but the middle-aged people were basically knew the same amount because the han had the cultural and economic incentive to learn it and the e people now have the economic incentive to learn but then the young people neither of them knew.
Barnabas:
[1:06:03] Much about it because it was already after the overharvest had decimated the local populations And the local people who still collect orchids, it's because they see them almost like family. I've documented a whole bunch of villages where they still grow orchids. But the villages that didn't really highly value them that way, when the orchid prices collapsed, they just tilled them under. Hundreds of thousands of these little orchid plants were just tilled under and replaced with food crops that were more economically valuable. And for that reason, the germplasm was devastated. So my goal when I first came here was to have the kind of.
Barnabas:
[1:06:43] Maybe start a germplasm bank or a botanical garden that could go to these little villages and collect the plants because the local people know a lot about where they collected them because they were the ones who collected them or they know people who collected them so they know exactly which mountain it came from they know the germplasm source so that's kind of what i think a lot of people uh may not know that botanical gardens can actually re-establish biodiversity in devastated areas because they can help the local people to come up with more economic opportunities with the germplasm that they had been using. So that's kind of an idea I still hope in the future we can get on because these orchids still exist. Even though they're wild, extinct in the wild, they still exist in people's courtyards and pots. And some of the papers I sent you that you can see pictures of them in the little villages.
Brent:
[1:07:41] Yeah.
Keller:
[1:07:43] And then outside of germplasm banks, where I guess including them too, what are some of the other ways that we can include the younger generations and the urban generations, people that are now living in cities to get that traditional knowledge and appreciation for the environment?
Barnabas:
[1:07:59] Well, research is helpful. And I'm not just saying research as the end goal, but research as a process. Because in my experience, a lot of students don't have experience doing research. Like even what you guys are doing, you're sitting here doing qualitative research by interviewing people, right? You're learning things without knowing it sometimes, right? So that's a kind of a benefit of research. It allows people to have more opportunities that then they can have more purpose in what they're studying and kind of give them an incentive to study deeper. So I think having more research programs at both the high school and higher level, college and higher, where research is actually common. Common because students learning like you know most people in elementary in the u.s probably have grown lima beans or corn in paper towels to kind of see the germination process but that's about it but there's so much other kinds of things we can do with research you can interview people.
Barnabas:
[1:09:05] About their understanding of plants do a plant blindness survey and ask people 10 local plants and 10 local animals and see which one has the most that's interesting the students to do and And when students realize that they don't know about plants themselves, they're interviewing people about plants and they also don't know, that encourages them to learn more. And I think that's something that modern societies need to do more, urban areas need to do more where they encourage research, not just like at the kind of research and development kind of view, like economic or kind of research developed medicine or something like that, that's important. Just the benefit to society when people have a research mind, where they're thinking critically, where they're noticing differences and where problems are before they become widespread.
Brent:
[1:09:53] Yeah. Well, is there anything else you want to add before we wrap up? Any advice to students or anything additional people should know?
Barnabas:
[1:10:02] Well, I would say take a moment to look at the plants around you and ask yourself how many you know. If you don't know more than one of them, it might be worth your time to consider that and look into it more. And find someone who does know something about plants because that's one of the other ideas with plant blindness that the existence of a plant mentor, someone who's older that does know plants is the best way of getting a young person to know plants. If there's an educated, at least knowledgeable person about plants who's older is the easiest way to inspire a young person to learn about plants. And you can find them, they're all around. You don't have to have a degree to be a plant mentor. You just need to know about the plants. And visit botanical gardens. Visit public gardens. Everywhere in the world there are public gardens. And the more visitors they have, the more support they have to continue their important missions. So visit botanical gardens. Make it your aim to go to as many as possible because then you start to also notice what's good and bad about them, Why some gardens are more successful or more effective than others. That's helpful because it helps your critical thinker mind continue to be deeper. So that's what I would say.
Keller:
[1:11:24] Perfect. Thank you.