The Himalayas is an ideal location for the Missouri Botanical Garden, a world-renowned research facility. The Himalayas are one of the world’s most botanically diverse alpine regions, with hundreds of plant species found nowhere else. Outside the poles, people are witnessing some of the most immediate effects of climate change on the planet. To address these difficulties in the ecologically and culturally diverse Himalayas, the Garden’s research focuses on the effects of climate change on mountain plants and people. Since its inception in 2005, the initiative has brought together many Garden experts and a diverse group of worldwide collaborators, including relationships with local communities.
The African diaspora to the Americas consisted of both flora and people. European slavers provisioned their human cargoes with African and other Old World valuable plants, allowing their enslaved labor force and free men to plant them in their gardens. Africans were also familiar with several Asian plants from previous crop exchanges with the Indian subcontinent. New World Africans cultivated African plants on plantation subsistence fields and in their garden plots for use in medicine, religious activities, cordage, and dyeing. Since the abolition of plantation slavery in the early 19th century, the Caribbean’s impoverished black majority has relied on the folk medical tradition given down by their enslaved, maroon, and free black forefathers. The poor’s lack of access to safe and trustworthy health care has contributed to the usage of folk pharmacopeias and botanicals to cure illness.
Bibliography
Mbgadmin. “Highs and Lows: How Climate Change Is Impacting People and Plants in the Himalayas.” Discover + Share, 12 Feb. 2024, discoverandshare.org/2023/12/08/highs-and-lows-how-climate-change-is-impacting-people-and-plants-in-the-himalayas/.
AFRICAN TRADITIONAL PLANT KNOWLEDGE IN THE CIRCUM-CARIBBEAN REGION
JUDITH A. CARNEY
Department of Geography, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095