Comment: Plants, people, history, and culture for all classrooms
I began assembling this website to supplement a short course to be offered at NSTA 2003 in Philadelphia. The course is directed toward the teaching resources to be found in international grocery stores, farmers' markets, and mainstream supermarkets. My own interest in the vast and tangled topic of plants, people, history, and culture has origins in family, landscape, and table. The interest has evolved professionally and personally through travel in North America, Europe, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, and Asia and through teaching experiences in Missouri, Illinois, New Mexico, Sierra Leone, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore. The pages seem to have become something of a chaotic garden--perhaps structured more like a pekarangan or milpa than an ordered field with straight rows and plowed middles.
The magnitude and cascade of consequences that have accrued from plant exchanges, transfers, and invasions continue to amaze me. Our human blindness about the coupled history and fate of plants and us motivates my efforts as a teacher to explore the topic and to provoke my students.
In Singapore I share with students the strange case of the rubber tree and suggest that perhaps we humans have been domesticated by plants. Expatriate children should not blame parents but rather the rubber tree for their transportation to a strange land.
I marvel at the transformation of landscape all over the world. The vast swampforest of Southeast Missouri becomes unending fields of soybeans from Asia. The primeval dipterocarp forests of Malaysia become monocultural stands of African Oil Palm and Brazilian Rubber. The Industrial Revolution in Europe is purchased with sugar and connected with latex.
My Sierra Leonean friends wax nostalgic over cassava leaf--a sauce for rice derived from a plant introduced by slave traders. My Thai friends swear that chili originated in Thailand. My Navajo friends relish fry bread, a food made from an alien grass, reminiscent of a time of oppression, and representative today of adaptability, endurance, and survival.
I hope visitors will enjoy wandering around the site, following the links, contemplating the symbioses, and discovering new possibilities. |
