Lineage after Rupture: Learning Herbalism in a Broken Ecology

We live in the afterlife of laws signed into power by monarchs with political agendas of expansion. Laws that criminalized animistic practices and severed people from the more-than-human world. Though this history can feel distant to some, its impact remains embedded in contemporary western herbalism. Across the continents, relationship to land, sea and plants was not simply forgotten, it was actively suppressed and punished. Knowledge was outlawed, unless coming from defined institutions. Access to place was restricted by race and sex. Memory was severed through cultural genocide and replaced with conversion schooling and policy. While colonial expectation and narration replaced kinship with separation. 

The plants endured as they so cleverly do. Plantain leaf continued to grow along the compacted paths and roadsides and dandelions returned each spring to broken soil. They adapted without forgetting who they were in the necessity of compromise and adapting to a world becoming overrun by humans. What was splintered were the stories that once taught us how to listen. We came to recognize a plant by its name or use, but no longer by its presence. Without those recognitions, resilience can be misconstrued as availability. 

In this fractured landscape, lineage in herbal education is often misunderstood as a credential or at times ties to a blood line, something one either possesses or lacks. In North America especially, the language of being ‘self-taught’ has become common in herbal spaces. Celebrated as independence or exceptional smarts and claimed out of perceived necessity, yet the fact remains that no one learns anything, truly alone. Although, one can certainly be self directed in an autonomous process seeking knowledge. However, nothing grows in isolation, this fundamental fact of life is also true of wisdom and knowledge. Even when physically present human teachers are absent, Nettle for example, teaches through proximity and consequence. Through sting and relief, asking one to slow down and demanding attention and perseverance. 

Or learning that is shaped by beloved books that sit crooked on the shelf from the binding wearing out due to trusted reference, were written by others. Lineage then is not simply about who taught us, but about whether we recognize the web of relationships that make our learning possible and whether we accept the responsibility for how that learning is carried forward, and shared. When lineage is reduced to personal authority rather than collective care, plant knowledge risks becoming extractive and exclusive. Untethered to history, consequence and reciprocity. We must ask: In the wake of this, what culture might this create?

The truth is many of us are navigating herbal education within highly individualistic cultures, but zooming out we can see that an herbalist claiming that they are self-taught is a symptom of this exact rupture. Plants rarely model isolation. Even phytochemistry is a symphony of relationships between chemicals, alchemizing into their specific forms. Elder trees grow in clusters. Yarrow spreads by rhizome. Even the most solitary looking tree is woven into networks of fungi, bacteria and insects beneath the soil. In this context, claiming to be self-taught is not defiance, but disconnection. This is not a personal failure, but the logical outcome of the wider rupture at play. Still, lineage persists. It may arrive in the groves of hawthorn trees as you stand under their canopy in awe as they steadied the nervous system. Or through a classroom that fostered careful thinking while the teachers goal was to help students organize their own thoughts to understand them more thoroughly. Or through the pages of a book, a labor of love written by another, that the student can still recall the scent of biblichor upon memory of summer.

Relationship after all, is how life on earth functions. Our world is shaped not only by competition of resources between species, but on a much larger scale, it is shaped with deep collaboration. The planetary feedback systems that sustain our planet, which we have named in modern day as the biogeochemical cycles (Carbon, Nitrogen, Sulfur, Phosphorus cycles) are in dialogue and response to community. The forests call the rain in-land towards themselves through the divine act of transpiration, in communication with large bodies of water far away. The whales significantly impact the glorious ocean currents regulating global temperatures and significantly impacting the lives of critters in the sea. Algae release dimethyl-sulfide which oxidizes once entering the on-going conversation within the atmosphere, eventually birthing the clouds that hang generously above. These exchanges are not symbolic; they are the material manifestations that sustain life. Cause and effect are braided together, each action shaping the conditions for what follows. 

The carbon cycle offers one example of this intimacy. Carbon moves continually between the atmosphere, oceans, rock, and living bodies of beings. The linden leaves, for instance, breathe carbon in and transform it into sugar and oxygen, as well as their own bodies. Or the oceans absorb carbon when it is atmospheric, buffering the atmosphere while nourishing countless forms of life exchanging in the sea. Over deep time these exchanges have kept Earth’s conditions within the narrow range that life can tolerate. But when this balance is disrupted, like by humans contributing to pollution, or by deforestation practices; the effects ripple outward. Altering waterways, weather systems and ecosystems. Earth does not remain inert though, Earth intensifies as a response. Hurricanes and storms for example are not random acts of violence, but a part of this dynamic planetary feedback process. Powerful winds will churn up the oceans drawing nutrient-rich waters upward stimulating plankton blooms at the surface of the sea that will absorb carbon out of the atmosphere. This is earth attempting regulation under strain, redistributing energy and matter in an effort to restore balance. 

So we can see that Earth behaves as an aware-living system. Regulating itself through feedback, reciprocity, and communication; much like our own bodies do in the wake of imbalance. Indigenous science insists that this was always known, that rivers and mountains have agency and voice and are in conversation with the far off sea through the wind. It's only when we separate ourselves (intellectually, culturally or spiritually) from these systems that we misunderstand our own learning, knowledge and role. 

This separation also shows up definitively in how familiar phrases are used. “As above, so below” is often repeated in herbal and spiritual spaces, but not openly practiced as an embodied reality. What is fundamentally meant by that phrase in the physical world, is what happens in our atmosphere happens in the soil. And, what happens in the seas ripples in our bloodstream. It is a quote representing the vast experience of relationship and how far it spans. These are not only metaphors for one's spiritual life, so much as a description of shared processes. In a world shaped by relationships, nothing comes into it being alone or evolves singularly. 

Many herbalists arrive at their practice through self-directed paths, the present issue is not around autonomy. They follow curiosity, necessity, intuition and more. It's largely inspiring to witness. These pathways are not a lesser form of learning; they are often clever adaptive responses to cultural rupture, geographic isolation or the absence of physically present teachers. To say self-taught is not wrong, as much as it is incomplete. It names independence while obscuring relationship. It centers the learner while leaving unspoken the many beings, human and more-than-human, who shaped so much. Lineage does not disappear when teachers are absent, it just becomes harder to see but everyone still participates in it. We are all accountable to history.

This is not a call to abandon modern forms of education, nor a dismissal of self-directed learning, but to deepen them. To root into responsibility, rather than accumulation. When we do this, it becomes a practice of care rather than consumption. If education shapes behavior, then herbal education also shapes ecosystems. What we teach, how we teach, and what we leave unspoken all have material effects. Teaching a plant without teaching its abundance or scarcity changes how one interacts with it. Even teaching silence, eventually, can alter water ways, landscapes, and ocean floors too frequently as we see in the present day of climate change. When learning is relational it once again becomes regenerative.

In a culture that praises individual achievement, naming lineage can feel like counter-culture. But it doesn’t require unbroken tradition, it only requires honesty. It offers us a way to move forward by learning from the mistakes we’ve made in an attempt to not repeat the patterns that caused the rupture in the first place. Self-taught is a conceptual impossibility in a relational world, by reconnecting to the interconnectedness of all things, we find a way to restore gratitude, take responsibility and bestow humility to a world too dehydrated from it. 

This reframing also invites inclusion, rather than drawing hard lines from ‘trained’ and ‘untrained’ it allows for many pathways to be acknowledged in the waves of honesty. In doing so herbal education can once again function as a folkway, not just a transfer of information. Instead, a living practice takes the stage, and all things living are exchanging, and deepening together. Lineage can once again become an act of care. Care for plants, planet, story, environment and future. Not to claim ownership, but to accept responsibility. Tending to this living, ever-changing relationship is inseparable from tending to the living systems that make herbalism possible at all. Not to call people out, but to shift our culture to call people in.