ABSTRACT
In her book Loving Nature, Kay Milton (2002) asks a simple question: How do communities and individuals develop a protective and caring relationship with nature? Milton synthesizes ideas from religion, science, and psychology to advance, in one respect, Tim Ingold’s theory that people’s direct experience(s) with the natural environment acts alongside social constructs to produce deep emotional bonds with the environment that include its protection. It would not be surprising, then, to find that societies directly dependent on plants economically and medically1 would have correspondingly high levels of plant-based knowledge and environmental stewardship, and that
they may have evolved sacred and pragmatic techniques of conserving certain kinds of plants like medicinal ones. The Nepali people comprise such a society and Nepali farmers and others dependent on them commonly consult medical practices that rely on plants. Both Ayurvedic2 and Amchi medicine extensively utilize plants to alleviate suffering due to illness and to rebalance the body’s humors.3 In this chapter, I detail how Ayurvedic doctors acknowledge and actualize a love for medicinal plants, jaribut.i, and how their caring converges with ‘scientific’ language from biomedicine and environmentalism about nature. The use of plants in healing finds a receptive population among urban and rural Nepalis, and discourse about medicinal plants is generated in a variety of places.4 In this chapter, I draw attention to the politics of conserving Ayurvedic medicinal plants within contexts of local engagement with nature and the environment that are common to lay Nepalis, specific engagements with medicinal plants by family-trained and academically trained doctors, and government and non-government organizations’ efforts to protect medicinal plants.
