Acmella Oleracea: Use and Cultivation

Not too long ago I worked at a local hydroponics shop. The focus of the store was nutrients, so we didn’t have too many plants on display—mostly tomatoes and orchids—but there was an odd assortment of other strange plants tucked away in the corners of the shop, all unlabeled of course. One of these was a lanky herb buried beneath the tomatoes, unremarkable save for its bright yellow flower.

I’d walk past it every day, not knowing what it was. Just some unfortunate ornamental, I figured. Then one day a customer came in and after some time wandered toward the plant. “Nice,” he said. “Didn’t know you guys had snakebite in here.”

 “Had what?” I asked.

He pointed to the little yellow flower peeking through the tomato vines. “Snakebite. I found it in a farmer’s market once a while back, can’t remember the actual name. It’s used to cure snakebites apparently. Makes your mouth numb when you eat it, too. Sort of like lidocaine.”

He broke one of the smaller leaves off the plant and passed it to me. As soon as I bit into it I felt a strong citrus flavor, followed by a tingling in my mouth like I’d licked a 9-Volt. The feeling was so intense that for a moment I worried I was having some sort of allergic reaction. But just as soon as it had come, it was gone again.

“What’s it called again?” I asked.

In its long co-history with humanity, Acmella oleracea, or “spilanthes,” has been called by multiple names—snakebite, buzz button, jambu, electric daisy, toothache, to name a few. The most characteristic aspect of the plant is, of course, the numbing-buzzing sensation produced when one eats it. This, however, is not the only function of the herb. Spilanthes has over the centuries been used as an ally against a variety of maladies, from inflammation to dysentery to malaria to, you guessed it, toothaches.

With such multifaceted usage, the fact of spilanthes’s global distribution is unsurprising. But like all plants, it has a place of origin, and consequently a story of how it has ended up where it is now.

An Herbal History of A. Oleracea

The toothache plant doesn’t exist in the wild—or rather, it didn’t before its naturalization in certain areas. Rather, it is the cultivated descendant of A. abla: A Brazilian herb sharing many of the same prized traits. Collecting and growing Alba for some unknown amount of time, Brazil’s indigenous peoples bred it into what we know today as A. oleracea. From there, this new species became an important part of indigenous medicine and food.

During the colonial period, the invasion of the Americas by European powers introduced a radical shift in the way that flora and fauna dispersed. The trade of plants and plant seeds via colonial trade routes was an explosion of both intentional and unintentional species introduction in nearly every corner of the world.  It was in this period that Portuguese explorers first brought A. oleracea to Europe, whereby it further spread into Northern Africa and India. And everywhere it went, it found a purpose.

Uses of A. Oleracea: Traditional and Clinical

When I first started talking with people in the ethnobotany community, I was given a piece of advice that I consider the most important rule on how I approach medicinals: The more alleged benefits a specific plant has, the more skeptical one should be of its actual properties.

Throughout history, A. oleracea has been said to be a remedy for a variety of disparate ailments, but unlike many of the other cure-all herbs out there it has been studied extensively for its medicinal benefits, with clinical reports often supporting what folk tradition has long said. Except snakebites, it, like a lot of alleged snakebite cures, is helpless there.

The fatty acid spilanthol is the primary active compound in the plant, and the chemical responsible for its anesthetic effects. This, however, is not the only function spilanthol serves. In Mali, A. Oleracea flowers are often made into an extract used to treat malaria. In clinical studies, spilanthol has been shown to be larvicidal, effectively killing the larvae of Culex spp. In India, the plant has long been used to treat dysentery, while in academic research there have been reports of its antibacterial properties.

Then, winding back toward our point of origin, Brazil, we find the medicinal meeting the culinary with the substance known as Jambu: a concoction containing the extracted oils of A. oleracea, often used in foodstuffs as a flavoring agent. In this role, the plant’s strong taste serves as an antithesis to peppers, with the spilanthol and capsicum both complimenting and negating one another in indigenous dishes. Alongside adding a new and interesting flavor, the leaves themselves of the plant act as a sort of leafy green, with many of the same beneficial nutrients as other greens.

Of course much more could be said here about toothache plant’s uses all around the world: its popularity as a cosmetic ingredient, its use as a flavoring for chewing tobacco in India, its documented function of as a potent diuretic. But I’d be here all day if I tried to cover all those bases. A cosmopolitan plant, spilanthes has found innumerable uses throughout history, many of which have yet to be studied or are just now being researched. Keeping this in mind, there’s one last question I’d hoped to address in this post.

How do you grow it?

Cultivation

Seedlings, planted
late-August

So far, spilanthes has proved to be one of the easiest plants I’ve ever grown. Quite fecund, a single flower head contains what I counted to be a hundred or so seeds, all with extremely quick and reliable germination rates. Surface-sewing is the trick here to successful germination, as the seeds need exposure to light to germinate. A good deal of light too, or else they’ll grow real leggy real quick. Sewing in an old takeout container, I found that the seedlings will do marginally fine under a 40-watt bulb, but will only thrive once brought out into brighter light.

Second only to light, is temperature. Being a tropical plant, spilanthes hates the cold, and is frost-sensitive. In my experience (Zone 8b), established plants will tolerate temperatures at least as low as 40F, but in such conditions will quit growing entirely until it warms back up. Mine seem at their happiest when the temperature is in the low 80s, receiving direct afternoon light.

Once optimal growing conditions are achieved, it tends to take off quick, with roots filling out in no time. Luckily, the plant has proven to take transplanting well. At the sight of their first pairs of true leaves, I took my ten best seedlings and moved them into quart pots filled with a fertile, but well-draining soil. The plant is a heavier feeder, so after they had gotten settled I used some organic vegetable fertilizer on them. No signs of nutrient burn on any plants whatsoever.

Protecting my plants from freezing temperatures

When watering, it is better to err on the side of caution, as toothache plant doesn’t enjoy soggy soil. At the same time, however, it is recommended to not let the soil dry out entirely, as neither does it thrive under dry periods. The plant will tolerate some underwatering or overwatering, but growth will be stunted as a result.

[I am still in the process of cultivating this wonderful plant, so more will be added as I learn more of its likes and dislikes. Thank you for your patience :) ]

Learn More

• Acmella Oleracea: The Toothache Plant
• High therapeutic potential of Spilanthes acmella: A review
• Plant Resources of Tropical Africa: Acmella Oleracea

October Revolution, 102 Year Later

This post will be a bit more on the short side as its being written on the fly, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity of celebrating the October Revolution, on its one hundred and second birthday.

The October Revolution was a decisive moment in socialist history in which the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, overthrew Kerensky’s provisional government and seized control of Petrograd (St. Petersburg). It was this uprising that proved decisive in the rise of the Bolsheviks to power, and the spark that ignited the Russian Civil War that was to follow.

Preceding the October Revolution was the February Revolution, in which populist uprising against Tsar Nicholas II led to his abdication, and the establishment of a provisional government. This new government, while a liberal democracy rather than a monarchy, was still nonetheless bourgeoisie, and therefore sought only to keep the bourgeoisie in power, rather than transfer that power to the Russian workers and peasants.

The October Revolution, then, completed that transference of power, seizing it from the bourgeoisie and placing it into the hands of the soviets. This is the start of Soviet Russia, which in the civil war would grow into the Soviet Union, proving itself to stand strong against imperialist invaders. Today, the revolution is remembered as the first successful socialist revolution in history, and a reminder of what the revolutionary spirit may accomplish. The Bolsheviks’ taking of Petrograd was a shot, so to speak, heard by all the oppressed of the world, and inspiration for those who were to follow. In China, in Cuba, in Vietnam, in Korea. Now more than ever, as the parasite that is capitalism bleeds the world dry of its very lifeforce, the October Revolution should stand as inspiration for us too.

Вся власть советам!

Learn More:

• Ten Days that Shook the World, by John Reed
• The History of the Russian Revolution, by Leon Trotsky
• The State and Revolution, by Vladimir Lenin

The Chilean Protests and the Re-Liberation of a People

Writing on the Russian Revolution, Lenin said that there are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen. It was this revolution, and the period of brutal wars thereafter that led to deposing of the Russian tsar and the establishment of the world’s first truly socialist government (Paris Commune notwithstanding). It was this revolution that shook the world, and sent the spirit of liberation rippling through the hearts of the international proletariat.  

And while decades of progress can be achieved through weeks of struggle, so too can it be undone by mere days of counterrevolution.

Chile’s socialist party was founded in 1933. Following a path similar to Venezuela, the party sought change through the democratic election of socialist leaders, rather than wage war against its colonial oppressors. This approach culminated to the election of Marxist president Salvador Allende in 1970, the first ever leader to be put into power through democratic socialist means.

President Salvador Allende
Listen to his final speech here

This period after the second world war saw the attempted liberation of many Latin American nations. But just as it had throughout Asia and Africa, the iron fist of Western Imperialism came to bear down once more on those it had oppressed for so long. In Nicaragua, in Guatemala, in Chile. On September 11^th, 1973, a military coup backed by the CIA overthrew Allende and brought Chile under the rule of General Augusto Pinochet, which saw the establishment of a brutal fascist regime, and a return to a west-backed capitalist economy. His dictatorship, which lasted all the way into the early 90s, led to the torture and killing of socialist and left-wing rivals and the “disappearance” of some 3,000 dissenters. Unions were banned, institutions previously state-run were privatized, and wealth disparity rose as mass corruption and collusion spread across the government and economy. The heart of the Chilean people bled as decades of trauma were inflicted upon them, all so that the US could continue to enforce its imperialist and extractivist rule over the soul of a nation wrought with centuries of suffering and oppression.

Eventually, the military dictatorship ended, and Chile’s government transformed into a liberal democracy not too unlike that seen throughout most of the West. And while the terror of Pinochet was over, neoliberal market reforms continued to inflict scars on its citizenry. The West continued to starve the nation of its natural resources to fuel imperialist rule elsewhere in the world.

But the people can only be oppressed for so long, can only be pushed so far until they realize, as Marx said, that they have nothing to loose but the very chains of their enslavement. It is under these conditions that class-consciousness forms, and the revolutionary spirit takes hold once more.

Right now, the people of Chile have taken to the streets in protest, but you’ll see little coverage of it in the news. Western media has for the most part covered only the bourgeois-backed protests happening in Hong Kong, paying scant attention to what’s going on in Chile. Or Haiti. Or Lebanon. Or Iraq, Kashmir, Catalonia, Palestine, Ecuador and many other nations across the world that are fighting as the contradictions of neoliberalism begin to rear their gruesome head, as climate change poses an existential threat to the world and the bourgeois capitulate to fascism rather than undertake any semblance of socialist reform. In many ways, history is repeating itself, and as was the case before, so it is now: the ruling class will let the world burn and society devolve into barbarism if it means they remain in power. That is why they are silent on the Global South’s current string of uprisings, directing the public’s attention away from these, lest international solidarity is built.

In Chile, the protests began with a price increase of subway fares, or at least that was the tipping-point for the Chilean people. Subway fares, representative of a step too far. These protests, like many others, are the result of years of unrest amongst the people, leading to a point where enough is enough.

At the time of writing this, over one million people have taken to the streets of Chile, demanding massive economic reforms and the resignation of current president, Sebastian Pinera. The unrest has led to the destruction of most of Chile’s transit system, alongside the burning and looting of various private businesses. This has led to the president declaring a state of emergency, sending the Chilean army to crush the protests. Currently, the military has killed 19 people, and arrested thousands of others. And yet the fight continues.

These are conditions in which revolution is born.

To my understanding, currently there isn’t an organized force leading the protestors, no underlying ideology beyond anger toward the government. It is a movement of spontaneity. Its hard to say then what these protests may achieve: a move toward minor reformation, or a full-scale upheaval of the Chilean ruling class?

Granted, I’m not a Chilean myself. I have only the etic perspective to go by, and a cursory one at that. Nonetheless I’m optimistic. During Pinochet’s seizing of power, the Chilean singer, socialist, and activist Victor Jara was kidnapped by the military, tortured, and killed. At the time of writing this, protesters have been singing his songs out in the streets. Now again, as they struggle against capitalist totalitarianism once more.

Solidarity with the people of Chile.

STAY INFORMED:

• Are We Witnessing the Start of Another Leftist Wave Across Latin America?
• Agony and Death of Neoliberalism in Latin America
• Why is the Media Covering Protests in Hong Kong, Chile So Differently?

"Dark Ecology," a Review

"The Anthropocene doesn’t destroy Nature. The Anthropocene is Nature in its toxic nightmare form. Nature is the latent form of the Anthropocene waiting to emerge as catastrophe." -Timothy Morton

Climate Collapse, or Anthropo-Implosion?

Dark Ecology, my
edition's cover

With the normalization of the internet, there comes the proliferation of information and its ease of access. In tandem with this internet age has come the current concern surrounding global warming and the effects it will have not only on our ecologies, but us ourselves. Currently, we have already passed several points of no return in terms of saving out planet from warming, and now leading climate scientists are still looking toward mitigation rather than prevention. Even then, prospects are still dim: the petrochemical industry is still chugging along, so much so that the fossil fuel consumption has increasedrather than decreased. Secondly there is the problem of global food production, and its leveling of local ecosystems into monocropped fields prone to blight and nutrient deficiency. Instead if assisting in curbing these chronic issues, both the state and media have remained complacent in the destruction of our planet. Rather than tackle capitalistic origins of this current crisis, they go after the individual: eat less meat, drive less, don’t use plastic straws—you’re the cause of climate change, not corporations.

In short, neoliberalism has failed us, and the price of such failure will be the collapse of civilization (something that is already happening for indigenous communities and islanders). Coming part and parcel with this is a new brand of environmental nihilism that’s seemed to permeate the current climate culture. This nihilism is in fact so pervasive that recently there has been the attribution of all sorts of names to it: eco-anxiety, climate depression, and eco-grief, just to name a few. This depressive nihilism can imbue one with a What’s the point? sort of attitude toward climate change. It seems that the apocalypse is inevitable, so why try to change anything?

This is the milieu I’ve found myself in time and time again, and which Timothy Morton’s Dark Ecology attempts to mitigate. Here, Morton offers a pathway toward hope in an otherwise hopeless culture of climate-collapse writings. But unlike more utopian pieces, Dark Ecology’s hope doesn’t lie in the myth that we can still somehow save ourselves from this wicked problem. Rather, the hope is in rethinking what it means to be a species, what it means to be a global force, and what it means to be in the Anthropocene.

I Am (in) a Strange Loop

"Ecological awareness is a loop because human interference has a loop form, because ecological and biological systems are loops. And ultimately this is because to exist at all is to assume the form of a loop." -Timothy Morton

The infamous ouroborous found
all in the book

Dark Ecology is divided into three separate “threads,” each ending with the image of an ouroboros. Which makes sense, as loops are abound in this book. Loops of logic, of being. Feedback loops. Strange loops.

Now what exactly are these loops? I can’t quite say, because whenever Morton describes their nature his language is similar to that of a loop: a long and winding journey that ultimately brings the reader nowhere but back to where they started. In fact, it’s such language that does some of the greatest detriment to the genius at the bottom of this book. Morton’s writing can be best described as haphazard, which is bad when you also throw in his pop culture references, and even worse when you consider his penchant for creating new terminology with only vague descriptions. It is on this front that Dark Ecology seems to bring out the worst of critical theory’s tropes, which is really unfortunate because this is one of the critical theory texts I’ve read that’d I think would be most beneficial if written for laymen.

But perhaps my criticism in this aspect is just a bit too harsh. After all, one of the main goals of this book is helping to reader gain a sense of what Morton calls ecognosis—and hey, what’s a gnostic awakening if not confusing? He tackles some complex questions here, questions that not only challenge temporalities and scales but blow reality as we know it out of the water completely, so I guess it seems only a little understandable that reading such challenges would cause a fair sense of befuddlement. Nonetheless, the third “thread” of Dark Ecology is a near-unreadable nightmare because of the reasons stated above. Walking away from it I felt like I could have stopped at the second thread and missed few things of import.

The Big Green Monster

"Agrilogistics promises to eliminate fear, anxiety, and contradiction—social, physical, and ontological—by establishing thin rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds and by reducing existence to sheer quantity." -Timothy Morton

Morton to one side

If I had to take a wild guess at how many terms in this book Morton made up himself, I would say two dozen or so, maybe a little less. The vast majority of this new terminology in my opinion adds little to what is being discussed in the book (for example, was it really, really necessary for Morton to compare stages of climate grief to layers of chocolate?). But those few that do make an honest contribution, well to call them important is an understatement: they are absolutely groundbreaking.

Aaaand Kripal to the other

Let’s look at one of these right now, the most important of the important ones: Agrilogistics. This is one of the few concepts that Morton defines clearly and coherently, and he defines it thus: “a specific logistics of agriculture that arose in the Fertile Crescent and that is still plowing ahead. Logistics, because it is a technical, planned, and perfectly logical approach to built space.” To borrow another of Morton’s terms, agrilogistics is a hyperobject, a construct so inexplicably huge that it exists both within and outside of our temporal awareness. It is the operating system by which the Neolithic was initiated—an operation of eliminating contradiction and reducing ecology into a quantifiable use-value. As Morton argue in the Dark Ecology, it is the logic to rule all logics, the bringer of not only agriculture, but the man-nature divide as well, and that divide’s inevitable consequences: the Anthropocene.

The idea in and of itself should be enough to put Morton on the required-readings list of literally anyone interested in ecocriticism, and from its epicenter branch out, like tentacles, several other concepts which carry heavy theoretical significance: arche-lithic, easy-think substance, ecognosis, and of course, dark ecology. The discourses generated by these all coalesce into the final statement of the book, that it is by seeing and rejecting the agrilogistic model that we can work toward a multispecies solution to climate collapse.

The Mental Labyrinth

"'Civilization'" was a long-term collaboration between humans and wheat, humans and rock, humans and soil, not out of grand visions but out of something like desperation." -Timothy Morton

Before Morton, I had only ever read works by one Rice professor (despite Houston itself being so close to where I call home): Jeffrey Kripal, a religious studies professor with an avid interest in religious experiences and…alien abductions. Kripal was a weird read. Morton was a weird read. So it shouldn’t have come as too much a surprise when I encountered citations of Kripal’s The Serpent’s Gift in this book. But I was surprised, in a good way.

I was a kid when Hurricane Rita came through and tore up the gulf area of Southeast Texas. My family, we evacuated to my uncle’s place up in Marble Falls, arriving sometime shortly after the opening of the town’s fall festival. There was a corn maze there in the shape of Texas, and in the maze were eight different “towns” to visit, each town being a signpost with a hole-puncher chained to it. You were given a card and were supposed to traverse the maze and get your card punched once at each of the towns, then upon leaving the maze you won a free drink. It wasn’t like a regular maze where you go out one side and come out the other, then: here the beginning was the end, and the goal wasn’t to make it out the other side, but to discover everything you had to before going back the way you came.

That’s what reading Dark Ecology made me think of. That maze, the idea that I wasn’t trying to hurry and finish it so much as I was taking my time getting my bearings on everything I needed, no matter how long that took. I was working assiduously to punch-in all the major concepts.

I finally did come out of the maze that is Dark Ecology, and I did so with quite a few new concepts under my belt. I didn’t complete my punch card, though, even if I got close. I never won my free drink. But the analogy end there. The thing about the maze is its only open one month of the year, then closed the other eleven.

Dark Ecology, though. It never closes. It’ll still be there waiting for me when I’m ready to go back in, and deep down I know that someday I will be ready.

Top 5 Books of 2018

Compared to previous 2017, 2018 was a good year of reading for me. This was for a variety of reasons, but I’d say first and foremost it was because this I dived deep into the literatures of nature writing and environmental politics. You won’t find any fiction on this year’s top five. Rest assured, though, there are plenty of narrative treasures here that’ll make even the biggest fiction diehard’s heart sing.

5. Emergent Ecologies, by Eben Kirksey

Because of my coursework during my spring 2018 semester, I was tasked with reading not one, not two, but four ethnographies, so it makes sense for at least one of them to make this list. And while it at times comes off as overly-academic, Emergent Ecologies is the most approachable ethnography I have ever read, and one that I think will forever be near-and-dear to me because of its groundbreaking multispecies perspective. Plus, it has a whole chapter dedicated to my favorite insect: ants. While I’m not sure it’s something I’d recommend to the average reader, I believe it’s a must-have for any interested in ecocriticism.

4. The Portable Thoreau, edited by Jeffrey Cramer 

It’d be disingenuous of me to not put any Thoreau on the top five list of a year where Thoreau was read. This anthology of Thoreau’s work—over 600 pages long—offers a great starting-point for those new to Thoreau, alongside some more obscure works that even longtime scholars will find novel. It’s the complete package: Walden and Civil Disobedience in their entirety, followed by snippets of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and a multitude of journal entries, poems, and standalone essays. Better yet, the introduction to the anthology, some 30 pages long, manages to give a fantastic primer on Thoreau’s life and works without being dry. Rather, Cramer seems at least half the wordsmith that Thoreau was, which is a compliment of course.

I believe everyone should read Walden at least once in their life, and likewise I believe that this anthology is where it’s at: Offering just that and then more.

3. Becoming Animal, by David Abram

Seldom are my underlying beliefs so shaken by a book. That isn’t to say that books have never changed my perception of things, but I’m used to books working subtly in this department: illuminating new pathways here and there, adding one more torch to help in lighting the darkness of the unknown.

That’s what I’m used to, but that’s not what this book does. Becoming Animal is an exploding bottle rocket, casting the whole of the world in a blinding new light of knowledge. Furthermore, using the platonic for analogy, it shows that what I thought were forms in and of themselves are no more than mere shadows. Abram’s nature in this book isn’t a lump of thing: it is a fully living organism that exists as one, as all, and everything in between. We find ourselves enmeshed within the folds of this living world, which is equally entwined with our minds. By “becoming animal” we can realize the truth of this interconnectivity.

Transcendentalist almost, this book seems to take Emerson’s concept of the Over-Soul and tweak it for the 21^st century. It’s more complex than that, of course, but you’ll have to read it yourself (and read carefully) to get it all.

2. Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey

Before this year I didn’t know about nature writing. I knew Thoreau, and I’d a faint idea that Muir was an author that I’d enjoy reading, but I didn’t know that there existed an entire tradition of nature writings in American literature. That’s something I only learned in a class I took that spring, a class aptly titled “Human Place in Nature.”

Desert Solitaire was the last book in the class that we read in its entirety, and the first piece of nature writing we read coming straight from the counterculture movement. But don’t be fooled: Abbey bears no resemblance to the archetypal hippie. He’s too angry but down to earth to be a flowerchild. Instead, Abbey can be likened to an old anarchist, more likely to pick up a Molotov than a protest sign. And its exactly this sort of disposition that makes Desert Solitaire so engaging: Abbey isn’t afraid to be coarse, isn’t afraid to offend. His is a language rough-written, with the point bare and there and often devoid of any flowery language.

And don’t even get me started on the actual philosophical content of the book. Tucked away in these pages Abbey puts forth ideas about us and nature so radical that even now, 50 years later, they would be certain to turn heads.

1. The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

If I remember correctly, it took me all of three days to read this—the shortest book I read this year. Unlike most nonfiction I read, I bought it on impulse. I didn’t expect much from it, but I got it because it was short, it looked fun, and I like snails.

Upon turning that last page, I found myself humbled. No book had ever had the same deep emotional impact on me that this one did, especially not one so short.

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating blends biology with memoir, becoming both a treatise on the nature of snails and one woman’s recovery from illness. Maybe it’s because of my mom’s own experience with chronic illness, but reading this I felt as if I knew Bailey personally. Yes, it’s a book about snails, but it’s a book about the author, and in that caliber she succeeds at delivering with a voice more intimate than any other. All of the books on this list discuss nature in some capacity, but it’s only here that we get to see the relationship between us and the natural world so personally.

Plus, there’s a chapter about snail mating habits.