From Healing Herbs to Dangerous Drugs: Western Medicine’s War on the Natural World

  • 2025/11/27 00:10


From back cover:

“Western medicine’s preference for the development and marketing of dangerous drugs over the earlier use of healing herbs is a direct product of its mechanistic beliefs. Rather than use the entire plant, western medicine prefers to isolate the plant’s most active ingredients in order to develop a more potent force. However, in general, isolated and “refined” drugs are much more toxic than are the substances from which they are derived. (It is no coincidence that the word “pharmaceutical” derives from an ancient Greek word meaning “poison.”) It appears that the combined properties of plants serve complementary functions providing safeguards that are missing when particular ingredients are refined and extracted from the whole plant…

…while researchers attempt to justify animal experimentation by the claim that animals are different from human beings, they also seek to justify it scientifically by “reasoning” that animals are similar to human beings. But, although animals are similar to humans in the important aspects of life – i.e., they feel joy, sadness, loneliness, and fear- their physiologies differ significantly from our own. Each species has a unique constitution and develops diseases and responds to drugs in very different ways. Thus, “penicillin kills guinea pigs. But the same guinea pigs can safely eat strychnine, one of the deadliest poisons for humans – but not for monkeys”; opium is “harmless to dogs and chickens”; “morphine, which calms and anesthetizes humans, causes maniacal excitement in cats and mice”; thalidomide, though tested extensively and “proven” safe in several species, later caused birth defects in the ten thousand children born to pregnant mothers who took this drug.”

From_Healing_Herbs_to_Dangerous_Drugs pdf

The Killing Game: An Ecofeminist Critique of Hunting

  • 2025/11/26 23:11

From back cover:

“Most hunters ignore the question of the animal’s subjective experience, defending their actions by reference to the purity of their own motives and desires, and, in particular, by presenting their desire to hunt as a need. Hunters have used several strategies to justify hunting, which I have categorized by means of a tripartite typology that distinguishes hunters according to the particular need they argue hunting fulfills: The “happy hunter” hunts for the purpose of enjoyment and pleasure, as well as character development (psychological need); the “holist hunter’ hunts for the purpose of maintaining the balance of nature (ecological need); and the “holy hunter” hunts in order to attain a spiritual state (religious need)…

…Hunters claim that in the course of stalking their prey, they imaginatively enter into the life of the animal. But whereas hunters claim that this exercise in imagination helps them develop feelings of empathy for the animal, it is their inability to understand the experience of nonhuman animals that is a prerequisite of their hunt. As we have seen, hunters also emphasize the keen sense of alertness and attention that characterizes their state of mind. It is apparent, however, that if hunters were truly attending to nature, instead of to their own amorphous feelings of “love” and “connection,” they would feel the terror and fright of the animal they seek to kill…

…The pursuit of the animal expresses the hunter’s yearning to repossess his lost female and animal nature. The death of the animal ensures that this oneness with nature is not genuinely attained. Violence becomes the only way in which the hunter can experience this sense of oneness while asserting his masculine self-identity as an autonomous human being. By killing the animal, the hunter ritually enacts the death of his longing for a return to a primordial female/animal world.”

The Killing Game_An Ecofeminist Critique of Hunting pdf