One River by Wade Davis combines
the story of Richard Evan Schultes, the great pioneer of ethnobotany, with the
story of Davis and his colleague Timothy Plowman, a generation later (that last link is behind a paywall). The book
is a great introduction to the Amazon, but also to the scientific study of
plants with the help of the indigenous peoples who use them everyday. The
systems of knowledge used to classify and combine a huge variety of plants in
the Amazon contain a tremendous amount of information, but that information is
not necessarily organized and deployed in the same way that it has been in a
biological understanding of plant life.
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