How Mexico’s vast biodiversity has been exploited for generations

Mexico is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, a fact the Spanish Empire took notice of nearly as soon as they arrived centuries ago, setting up a clash of cultures that still has echoes today.

It’s what Amherst College professor Rick López explores in his new book, "Rooted in Place," where he delves into the historical connections between politics and Mexico’s natural world.

López joined The Show to talk more about it, saying he initially just wanted to read a book like this — so, he ended up writing it.

Full conversation

RICK LÓPEZ: I was really surprised to find that there was almost nothing written about it; only a couple of things written about Costa Rica, but, other than that, no one had really explored this question in relation to any Latin American country. So before I knew it, I was writing this book.

LAUREN GILGER: You're writing this book because you wanted to read it. Always a good reason to write a book.

So take us to that time in Mexico and kind of paint the picture for us. Where do these connections between the nature, the flora of Mexico kind of interact with history to begin with for you in this book?

LÓPEZ: Well, it's amazing how early after the conquest, the Spanish crown recognized that Mexico was a land of unusual biodiversity. They didn't use that term back then.

GILGER: Right.

LÓPEZ: And today, Mexico is still recognized as the third most biodiverse country in the world. But after the conquest, the king decided he wanted to know more about what these resources were and how to exploit them.

That's where the story really begins. He sent one of his top medical officials, a guy named Francisco Hernández — he sent him to Mexico and told him to sit down with the Native doctors who had trained in the pre-conquest universities, known as calmecac, and learn about the plants that they presented to him, and to document this information, test it and bring it back.

GILGER: What kinds of plants are we talking about here? Just so folks can get their brains wrapped around this. When we talk about biodiversity in Mexico, what do you mean?

LÓPEZ: Well, there's an enormous diversity, but Francisco Hernández was primarily interested in medicinal plants. At that time, most medicines came from plants, and these were known as "simples," and it was these that people depended on for all kinds of things — daily uses, military troops, you name it.

But when he came here, he discovered that there were far more plants than people possibly imagine. The ancients thought that there were only 300 to 900 plants in the entire world. Hernández, in seven years, discovered more than 3,000 plants previously unknown to European science.

GILGER: Wow.

LÓPEZ: So he also was trying to figure out, "how do you organize this knowledge?" He developed systems of naming a taxonomy based on the Indigenous language of Nahuatl and their intellectual view of plants.

He also developed different ways of illustrating plants because there was no set way of naming plants, nor of depicting plants. The botany back then in Europe was sort of the Wild West. So he was trying to bring some order to this and using that to not only expand European knowledge, but also give that knowledge back to the native population because they were dying in large numbers.

During the time he was in Mexico, half the Native population died of disease.

GILGER: My goodness.

LÓPEZ: So he himself saw that this was a disappearing knowledge and that the need to organize it was urgent.

GILGER: So this is interesting because it sounds a little different than the history of maybe what happened in America when colonization came to this country and, you know, clashed with, largely the Native American populations here and, sort of, didn't listen to the advice maybe of many of the Indigenous folks here, who said, "we know all about this botany, and using it and understanding it for various purposes for millennia."

LÓPEZ: Yeah. You know, in other parts of the Americas, Europeans could operate under the conceits that Natives were just part of nature and that they didn't have anything to learn from them. But in Mexico, where the systems of education, of medicine, of botany were so highly developed, it was clear that Europeans would not be able to harness these resources without also tapping into native knowledge.

That said, I must say, Francisco Hernández was a bit of an exception here. This deep collaboration that we saw between them is something unexpected. I didn't expect to see it. Authors haven't really talked about it, but it's obvious in the documentation how deep this went. When he brought this information back to Europe, his European colleagues were less receptive.

GILGER: I wanted to ask exactly that. Like, what was the, kind of European reaction to this? Like, did they give it some real credence?

LÓPEZ: Initially, there was great enthusiasm, but very quickly the attitude changed. The crown became paranoid about European competitors, about them getting access to this information, so they locked it away and hardly let anybody see this.

And then, to make matters worse, they also prohibited any further explorations of this kind, because as they moved into a more fully blown colonial project, they became very hesitant about Indigenous understandings of their own past. They decided they wanted to create the fiction that the Indigenous people had no past, had no science, had no history.

GILGER: Wow.

LÓPEZ: So they were cutting this off. They put all this in hiding, and then before they knew it, there was a fire in the royal palace. And this was all lost. Almost all of it was lost. Just enough was left for me to get my hands on it.

GILGER: Right. So you looked at what was left of it. So let's talk lastly about the implications of this today, because what you're exploring here is the ways in which that kind of documentation and maybe exploitation of the nature of this country has really been integrated into its identity. I mean, you hear Claudia Sheinbaum today say, "without corn, there is no Mexico." Right?

Like, this seems to be coming to a new recognition, right?

LÓPEZ: That's exactly the case. It does have a trajectory that gets it to the modern form. After Hernández's expedition, there was a royal botanical expedition that I analyzed that took place in the 1700s. And then in the 19th century, there were a lot of scientific expeditions to reach back to those previous expeditions, and they kept coming back to Hernández.

Hernández meant something really important, because it was through Hernández that we could figure out what was native and what really belonged to Mexico, both as intellectual traditions and actual plants and resources.

So when Sheinbaum is talking about the importance of biodiversity for Mexico and the importance of corn, she's invoking this long and complex and very weighted history of how Mexicans have understood their world and their connections to the plants, the environments and the Indigenous cultures that are so central to Mexican identity.

GILGER: What do you think that means today? Like, do you think it carries the weight that it should?

LÓPEZ: Well, her recognition of its importance is something that's rather bold and new because for so long, the emphasis had been on imported crops. But now with this attention to corn as central to Mexican identity, and not just corn, but other native plants, huge initiatives are taking place.

They're developing new seed banks within Mexico that can preserve these native species and make them available to everyday Mexicans to grow and to provide for themselves.

GILGER: Well, there's lots more we could talk about, but we'll have to leave it there for now. That is Rick López, a professor at Amherst College and author of the new book, "Rooted in Place." Rick, thank you for coming on. Thanks for talking to me about this. I appreciate it.

LÓPEZ: It was a real pleasure. Thank you for having me.