// Definition
The scientific study of the relationships between humans and plants — encompassing how cultures use, cultivate, name, and understand plant species across history. Robert Connell Clarke's co-author Mark Merlin is a professional ethnobotanist, and their book "Cannabis: Evolution and Ethnobotany" frames the entire cannabis story through this lens. The ethnobotanical perspective reveals cannabis not as a modern discovery but as a plant that has co-evolved with human civilisation since the Holocene epoch, shaping agriculture, medicine, spirituality, and trade for over 10,000 years.
// From the Episode
Ethnobotany was introduced as a formal discipline in Episode 13 through Robert Connell Clarke's discussion of his book with Mark Merlin. The co-evolutionary framework is central: humans shaped cannabis through millennia of selection — breeding for fibre, seed, resin, or medicine depending on regional needs — while cannabis shaped human culture by providing materials for clothing, food, medicine, and ritual. Clarke referenced Michael Pollan's "Botany of Desire" framework, which proposes that plants manipulate humans through desire just as much as humans manipulate plants through cultivation. This perspective elevates cannabis from a recreational substance to a keystone species in human agricultural history, with a relationship predating recorded civilisation.
// Source
Ep. 013 Hash Church XIII →