High Country Life

Many homeowners are moving away from traditional green lawns in favor of native flora that has long been practiced by Indigenous communities for centuries, drawing praise from both government institutions and non-Native groups alike. This trend has garnered much recognition.

Local people report various medicinal uses for herbs and plants, which vary according to philosophy, beliefs, attitude and culture of their community.

Medicinal Plants

Traditional medicinal plants have long been part of various cultures’ health care systems and used as part of disease prevention and health promotion strategies. While allopathic medicines offer cheaper and safer remedies than their herbal alternatives, traditional knowledge about medicinal plants is quickly being lost to technology advancement and rapid changes. Therefore, its preservation for future generations must be safeguarded.

Medicinal plants provide health care needs and contribute to local wellbeing in rural areas like Sangay, Ecuador. Their use is widespread; many medicinal plants are grown in home gardens for home gardens across this region and used primarily to alleviate digestive disorders according to other ethnobotanical studies. Furthermore, most medicinal plants collected for consumption come from wild locations so it is crucial that any sustainable use is achieved as well as compliance with all relevant government collection regulations.

Numerous factors play a part in how communities use medicinal plants, including philosophy, beliefs, attitudes, culture and economic status. Indigenous people in Mohmand Agency live an authentic lifestyle closely tied with nature through traditional use of medicinal plants that helps bring them closer to it while setting them apart from other communities in Pakistan.

Although most medicinal plants are at risk of extinction, there still exists hope for their preservation. To ensure this happens, measures should be taken to promote their cultivation and encourage herbal practitioners to collect them; additionally they should be integrated into national and regional health policies and programs as a form of insurance coverage.

Human activities threaten a substantial number of medicinal plants worldwide, particularly their recreational use. Most vulnerable are alkaloid-rich species such as ginseng and the Eucommia tree tree; research efforts must increase to conserve these medicinal plants while simultaneously encouraging cultivation in order to decrease demand for wild ones.

Food Plants

People relied heavily on plants as staples for maintaining a nutritious diet, whether fresh, dried, or ground into meal. People also harvested wild foods and hunted game for meat such as seal, walrus and Arctic hare for game meat consumption. Plant foods not only provided nutrition but were integral parts of traditional costumes and ceremonial practices as well.

Native American communities were traditionally home to dedicated members entrusted with protecting and saving seeds that represented intellectual property owned by tribes. Unfortunately, after the 1830 Indian Removal Act took effect, these tribal seed keepers were forced from their lands without giving anyone else their knowledge or passing it down through generations.

Loss of traditional food and medicinal plants has had a devastating impact on Indigenous communities across the US, and its absence has had serious repercussions for health and wellbeing. However, in Western United States there have been various efforts underway to reconnect Native communities with traditional foods and medicines through outreach and education – one such initiative being Dine Native Plants Program, run by Navajo Nation Tribal Government at Fort Defiance Arizona that serves to reconnect people to their food by teaching its names along with any histories associated with those names.

This program instills in children the importance of eating a traditional diet rooted in their environment and sustainable for long term consumption. Furthermore, it emphasizes some plants like sage and cedar as healing agents to treat colds, sore throats and poison ivy rashes with herbal remedies.

The program serves as an excellent example of how non-profit and government programs can use “food sovereignty,” an approach to eating that encourages people to grow, gather or buy local food and create their own medicines when necessary. Furthermore, natural materials should be preferred over plastics and metals which contribute to environmental pollution and illness. It has helped create a new generation of Native food producers who are cultivating and harvesting traditional herbs, vegetables and fruits such as dandelion greens, buffalo berries, cattail root, wild onions, camas bulbs and biscuit root among others.

Medicinal Herbs

Indigenous Peoples have long taken advantage of the healing properties of plants to treat various ailments, and herbal medicines remain widely used today – even modern drug research uses ethnobotany techniques to identify potentially active compounds. Unfortunately, however, their traditional medicine traditions often remain unknown to outsiders due to being embedded into each community’s philosophy, beliefs, attitudes, and culture – leading to surprises when harvesting and preparing these remedies is done in unique ways that often remain unclear even within its own community.

Farmer use medicinal herbs to maintain livestock health and well-being, prevent disease, and help heal wounds – practices which help conserve agrobiodiversity and medicinal knowledge in an age of rapid modernization and lack of education. These practices also contribute to maintaining biodiversity of plant species as agrobiodiversity dwindles away in this region.

In this study, traditional herbal remedies used for animal health were documented and published for the first time ever. It took place in Bajaur agency within Pakistan’s Federally Administrated Tribal Areas where there is an abundance of medicinal plants used to provide animal welfare benefits. Data collection involved interviewing local herbalists and farmers knowledgeable of their usage.

This study revealed that plant-based herbal medicines are mostly held by elder members who are highly esteemed for their ethnomedicinal knowledge and considered a heritage. Thus, documenting this wealth of knowledge and making it available to other communities is critical in safeguarding this heritage from being lost forever.

Traditional uses for medicinal plants in Ecuador typically target digestive ailments, which is consistent with studies (Bennett et al., 2002; Ceron, 2002; de la Torre et al., 2008). Our findings also demonstrated that home garden medicinal plants tend to mirror those commonly utilized in ethnobotanical research: most often reported were Caralluma tuberculata, Thymus serphyllum and Fagonia cretica as primary remedies – two new ethnomedicinal uses were discovered for Boerhaavia elongata Brandegee and Fumaria officinalis using confidential levels of URs were recorded during our present study.

Medicinal Trees

Plants around us not only provide sustenance and beauty, but are also an ancient form of medicine. Indigenous people have relied on plant medicines more frequently than animal-derived treatments for centuries. Although traditions differ depending on tribe and nation, many treat both physical and spiritual ailments using this holistic approach that also aims to prevent illness as much as treat symptoms.

Roots, berries or bark may make up some medicinal plants; while others take the form of leaves, flowers, seeds or buds. Echinacea is an example of such a flowering plant, commonly used by Native American medicine practitioners to treat colds. Its roots, leaves and petals can all be combined with tea leaves for infusing capsules for easy consumption; though its root extract may contain the strongest healing properties; all parts of this flowering plant provide something valuable in some way.

When it comes to the preservation of traditional medicinal plant knowledge, communities themselves are the best way to go about doing it. Jillian De Gezelle at UNC began the North Carolina Native Ethnobotany Project in 2014 to engage elders from local communities to record memories about wild foods and medicinal plants native to North Carolina. Project volunteers conduct interviews with elders regarding land connections as well as recording botanical specimens or old recipes/traditions while providing education about local plant species and their uses.

Indigenous communities have worked tirelessly for generations to cultivate and preserve medicinal plants used for healing purposes, yet much of this knowledge is quickly disappearing due to neglect or loss. Many medicinal plants now threaten our wellbeing if we lose them as part of an ecosystem that keeps us healthy.

This research collected information on 138 home gardens located across 11 communities of Sangay Parish (Agua Potable, Canari, Chinimp, Las Palmas, Paquisha Tarqui and Sangay). Home gardeners in these communities tend to be farmers using their produce as food or cultivating medicinal plants for health benefits; Ethnoveterinary medicines play a key part in healing systems among these peoples providing an inexpensive yet more sustainable solution than pharmaceutical drugs or synthetic animal medicines.