In the first days of 2010, the U.S. media has swamped us with predictions and prophecies of the world to come in this new decade. Specifically, all attention is on post-2012.

The first time I heard of the Mayan calendar, and its ending date of 2012, was at the Kitt Peak Observatory about 90 miles from Tucson, in winter 2004.  Several American universities have their telescopes aimed at the stars on the top of  Kitt Peak in this isolated Sonoran desert location, but the park guide was telling us what was happening on earth with the Mayan calendar in stone on the ground before us. He smiled and claimed, “We don’t know why it ends in 2012.”

Not many were paying attention in 2004, but it turns out several ancient civilizations marked 2012 as a date of significant change on planet earth.  What will be the event that turns the earth into the next phase? Scientists, authors, seers, and prophets predict calamitous events including an asteroid hitting earth, global warming bringing on another ice age (after this week’s weather across the U.S. and Europe, this is altogether plausible), the earth tilting on its axis, etc. Take your pick.

Skills required for survival, useful anytime

Humanity survived the last ice age 10,000 years ago, and if the species is to survive the predicted calamity of 2012, we will have to revert to our agrarian, self-sufficient habits and skills that have been fairly forgotten in just the last 50 years–in the U.S. particularly. 

One of the programs in the History Channel’s week of the apocalypse concerned how the individual family would survive.  In brief, forget about driving our SUVs (the oil companies are gone) and forget about telecommunications other than ham (amateur) radio.  No more internet surfing. Our driving is reduced to driving the horse pulling the plow so we can plant the only food we’ll be eating.  And there’s no Novartis or Bayer corporation to manufacture the medicines we’ve become dependent upon.  In fact, a lead character in the program dies from infection caused by a small cut on the hand.

In the U.S, unless your “tribe” of survivors  includes recent immigrants who know herbal treatments from their homeland, Americans are doomed. The expert quoted on the show was totally unaware of traditional herbal medicine which would be all that’s available in such a scenario.  Americans will be more likely than any other nationality to become extinct. If this had been filmed in Europe, Africa, any area of Asia, or any other country in the Western Hemisphere, there is widespread, common knowledge of the medicinal use of botanicals.  Canadians will do well (though it might be colder!).

We will be on a path of simpler times.  This website was launched with the inspiration of the role of women in carrying the herbal medicine bowl. For thousands of years women’s role has been that of healer, and that meant learning and passing down the generations knowledge of medicinal herbs.

A friend of mine, who immigrated from Hungary in 1937, told the story of her father (in the homeland) cutting a gash in his hand, and “he went into the garden and pulled a leaf off a plant, wrapped the leaf tightly over the wound, and in a few days it was healed.”  No rush to the ER, no antibiotics, no stitches.  It is possible to take care of ourselves.

We’d better learn what plant that was.  Ironically, or by design, many of the medicinal botanicals have been labeled “weeds” by the chemical corporations and the “modern” farmers they have spawned. My mother laughed uproariously when I told her that I used burdock root to help overcome pneumonia. “When I was a kid I earned 25-cents a day to hoe down burdock.” Milk thistle is another “weed” in the American farmland, but in Turkey I saw acres of this beautiful purple bloom grown for the herbal industry; it’s a healing botanical for the liver.

Self-sufficiency has been strong trait of the American character since the earliest settlers began moving West. In the 1830s homeopathic kits and first-aid guidebooks were best-sellers as we migrated West from the Eastern seaboard.  Herbal medicine and homeopathic remedies (made from medicinal plants) were our medicines. We need to reconnect with Mother Earth and become reacquainted with our roots–physically and spiritually.

Happy New Year! Salud!

Beverly A. Jensen, Ph.D.

President, www.WomensMedicineBowl.com