LIGNUM VITAE::GUIACUM OFFICINALE

Treasure Beach Forum: TB Runnin's: LIGNUM VITAE::GUIACUM OFFICINALE
Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By ZED on Friday, February 05, 2010 - 02:09 pm: Edit Post

IN REVERENCE OF...

Does anyone remember their maddas hanging branches of Lignum in our kitchens to keep out flies?

The bush pharmacists also used to source LG for "guiacum resin" (Compound Sarsaparilla), with the leaves and bark dispensed for a diuretic and a relief for rheumatism.

Our country folk have utilized every valuable dense ounce of the "Wood of Life" deep into our history (spectacularly for self-lubricating maritime propeller shafts and commonly for pulleys, mallets, mortars, bowls, unique furniture...) and there are going to be times that require harvesting of this butterfly-haloed goddess....Gaia talk...

What would you do if your constricted building Site were covered with lignums and you arranged your residential pavilions in such a way to save as many trees that are possible, especially for shading the intensely hot-sunny facades, but one or two, apparently, needed to be sacrificed?

Might you not want to honour and re-animate the "lignum spirit" by incorporating its trunk and limbs in all its variegated grain, and its blonde-and-black arbor-icity into your crafts and furniture and even structural supports...even, to recall, by location in the dwelling, the phantom place from which she seeded, grew, spread and was witness.

Here are some Architectural Inspirations which might affect anyone for whom concrete bastions are not the only "engineered" image of domesticity.

http://dornob.com/whole-tree-building-how-to-craft-super-natural-eco-homes/


Top of pagePrevious messageNext messageBottom of page Link to this message  By ZED on Saturday, February 06, 2010 - 10:10 am: Edit Post

A DIGRESSION
into some scientific Jamaican Bush Remedies:

Smart growth with Development: Pushing Knowledge, Science, Technology
published: Friday | November 30, 2007
Wilberne Persaud, Financial Gleaner Columnist

Over the past few weeks, I have been exchanging emails with an enterprising Jamaican scientist.

Our discussions restarted with a chance meeting a few months ago during which it was difficult for him to control his enthusiasm for the work he was doing. His name is Lawrence Williams and some of his work is in the area of isolating compounds in commonly used 'bush' remedies for possible development into pharmaceuticals, pesticides and herbicides.

We spoke of the phenomenal endemism of Jamaica, that is the extent to which there are plants unique to Jamaica, occurring nowhere else in the world.

I only became aware of this in the 1980s and particularly when I was lead author for Jamaica's position paper presented to the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Here's the thing, Jamaica, as Dr. Williams will tell you, has some rather positive features that present a predisposition to possibilities for breakthrough results from the study of its commonly occurring plants.

There are about 822 of them, those we know.

There may well be others.

Other factors:
Then there is the other and perhaps even more immediately important factor: In the West Indies as in other countries with a healthy serving of folk medicine, there are clues to potential beneficial uses of plants and their extracts.

Reliance on these kinds of clues goes by the big name 'ethnomedicine' or 'ethno-botanical' approaches to discovering useful drugs.

For completeness, I need to indicate that Dr. Williams is not the first to have shown an interest in this phenomenon.

For years, scientists at the University of the West Indies have been getting world-renowned researchers together at Natural Products Symposia.

We also have the creation of Canusol and Asmasol derived from cannabis (ganja) by Dr. Manley West. So from this perspective, we're not on to something entirely new. Is anything under the sun new?

But what can be new, exciting and beneficial to economic growth, development and prosperity is an approach to the pursuit of systematic discovery of materials that can lead to breakthrough results.
Results that can be useful to humanity by curing diseases, controlling pests in an environmentally friendly way and creating the infrastructure of an appropriately driven technological push to economic growth for Jamaica's creation of a kind of critical mass that would have spillover effects, a kind of node that grows exponentially.

Promising plants
As Dr. Williams spelled out for me in an email: "Several Jamaican plant extracts have showed promised in anti-cancer, antioxidant, anti-hypertensive, e.g. ACE inhibitor, screens.

However, the plants from which the extracts are obtained are not in abundant supply.
Therefore, the issue of large-scale cultivation of the promising plants to obtain extracts for nutraceutical development will have to be addressed.

In addition, the issues of plants from different soil types and climatic belts, which affect the variation in the chemical compositions (secondary metabolites), should be critically addressed and analysed and those giving the best biological effects (health benefits) selected for nutraceutical development."

Indeed, I have always argued that technological development need not be confined to the industrialised world.

Technology, strange but absolutely true, does not necessarily imply scientific knowledge - the compass was in use for years before we truly understood the principles of magnetism.

Nor does it necessarily, always and everywhere, require huge, prohibitively expensive resource outlays.

But it does require vision. And confidence. And if by chance we find a capitalist with the animal spirits that drive a willingness to venture into that murky unknown, instead of chasing half a basis point in the rate, we might have made it to true development.