Free Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television by Jerry Mander

medicinal uses.” De Novais mentions Indian medicines such as coca, ipecac, quinine, curare, among others, and traces how some of these led to anesthetics such as procaine and novocaine, and to cures for amebic dysentery, malaria, heart disease, and poisons, and to treatments for nerve disorders, epilepsy and others. All of these were first used by Indians.
    “The drug companies secure an adequate supply of the basic plant material, sometimes buying off Indian land for production, and sell the drugs derived from these plants to the world and to the people who first told them about them as well,” de Novais notes. “They make great profits from their ‘discoveries’ without any monetary reward to the Indians from whom they acquired their ‘drug secret.’ “ Quite the opposite in fact. By taking over the land and turning the Indians into laborers, while introducing the money system and imposing Western-style medicine, the drug companies put the Indians in the position of having to buy the medicines they formerly had in abundance.
    The question remains: How did the Indians know about the curative powers of plants in the first place?
     
    While researching the portion of this book that deals with the consequences of humans ingesting as much artificial light as we do now, particularly television light, I came upon an odd report in the New England Journal of Medicine. A team of doctors discovered that infant jaundice could be cured by ordinary sunlight. This discovery led to a spurt of articles on the possibility that natural light might be healthy for humans. What a revelation!
    The doctors had undertaken their study of the effects of sunlight on jaundiced infants when a day nurse remarked that the infants near the open window were improving faster than those who were away from it. Then, while working on the study, someone discovered that over seven thousand years ago, Egyptians treated jaundiced infants by placing them in the sunlight and feeding them an herb that had a beneficial interaction with the sun’s rays.
    The article did not ask, but I couldn’t help wondering how the Egyptians, stranded back there in time, discovered this important effect of sunlight and herb on jaundice without grants from the National Science Foundation.
    One explanation for the knowledge of earlier cultures, expounded by such people as the popular German writer Erich Von Daniken, is that humans—white with red hair—had arrived from outer space and taught the ignorant savages everything they knew. This kind of explanation, aside from its implicit racism and its entertainment value, is an indication of how far we all are from understanding knowledge systems that are based on direct experience.

    Recently, I had the chance to see some time-lapse films of plants by Dr. John Ott. Time-lapse photography makes it possible to see plants moving. It reveals them constantly straining for light like baby birds with their mouths open. Tendrils climb, crawl and wave around. Stems swell, inflate, then relax, like an inhaling and exhaling lung. Plants vibrate and pulsate in response to the immediate condition of their environment.
    In one particular sequence, passionflowers blossomed in an excruciating process of slowly mounting intensity. The bud began to turn into a flower, the petals took form and slowly burst out from the bud that contained them. Suddenly there was another burst of energy as the petals released themselves upward, stretching and straining every tiny tip, exhibiting a fullness of expression clearly analogous to orgasm and what even looked like plant pleasure.
    From this perspective, it is obvious that plants are alive in more or less the way humans and other animals are. Our failure to see plants as living creatures, and to appreciate our-selves as some kind of sped-up plant, is the result of limited human perception, a sign of the boundaries of our senses or the degree to which we have allowed them to atrophy, or the fact that we