Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature's Toxins—From Spices to Vices

by Noah Whiteman

The origin of our modern pharmacopoeia cannot be understood without an appreciation of the dynamic land use practices of Indigenous and local people who have lived in these ecosystems for millennia. In all the tropical biomes of the world, humans have been present and augmenting the landscape for hundreds to tens of thousands of years. The Mayan ruins, for example, rising from what is now dense jungle in Mexico give testament to this long heritage of cultivation. So do the eleven recently discovered 1,500-year-old human settlements under a rain forest in the Bolivian Amazon. The notion that these regions are pristine, or untouched by human influence, is inaccurate and rooted in the same tropes that motivated colonial and imperial conquest for centuries. Today’s primary tropical rain forest may have been a village at some distant point in the past. To varying degrees, tropical ecosystems have felt the impact of humans for as long as humans have been living in them. The most diverse ecosystems are not prehistoric time capsules.