Body: Plants and their Life Enhancing Power
You are entering into another "blog within the blog." This part, though only a beginning now, will bring information about how to help you improve your physical health and well-being.
Although we all suffer to one degree or another physically, this doesn't mean that we are without hope. It is true that all human beings are subject to eventual death, but even there we are not without hope. We don't belong to ourselves. I explained in other pages in this blog that Another purchased everyone. I know this is hard to believe but it did happen. The only thing is that we have yet to experience is what that means for our future. And that is hard to imagine.
OK, what do we do in the interim?
We have to take the steps that will give us the best health we can experience at this time. This is not something we can hand over to professionals. We have to take responsibility for our own situation whether that be financial, relational, mental, spiritual, and physical.
Now I am not immune from physical problems. I don't exercise as much as I could or should. I also became ill with Type 2 diabetes. Then as a result of that I had two heart attacks, and a colon resection. I took a pretty good hit and thought, like anyone would, that my days are numbered.
Well, as a matter of fact, they are numbered, and I don't like to think about that.
But I did find something that I should have known about from my childhood. And I believe that had I known and had been taught that in my home or in school that I probably would not have had to suffer these physical problems.
The True Story of the Creation of our Earth
When the earth was restructured from a dead mass into something that could support life, the first form of life placed upon it were plants -- bushes, trees, grasses, annuals, and perennials. These were on the earth and in the water.
Why?
In order for the earth to be reformed and restructured it had to have its land masses separate from its water masses. This could only have happened in a way that produced earthquakes, volcanoes, with lots of ash and carbon dioxide and monoxide. And probably very little, if any, oxygen.
Such a hostile environment could not support human or animal life. The solution was ...
Send in the plants!
The plants healed the atmosphere and the land making it possible for it to sustain animal life. They began to consume large quantities of carbon gases and released oxygen in the process. They also healed the land by shedding leaves, seeds, wood, fiber, moisture and nitrogen. This built the soil so that the plants could keep producing year after year.
Along with this the plants lived in a greenhouse caused by a separation of waters. The waters that boiled off the earth found their way into the stratosphere where the temperature kept the water in its most dense state, slightly above freezing. This greenhouse stabilized temperatures around the earth causing an abundance of plant life such as the earth had never experience before or since.
The process continued until the earth's atmosphere reached a balance of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen gases.
Then, almost like a test to make sure mammals could live in this environment, the birds, fish and insects were placed on the earth. Like a coal-miners canary, the birds proved that the earth was ready. The insects, of course, provided food for both fish and birds. The insects helped stabilize the processes by cleaning up any over production of waste and decaying matter. The worms further enriched the soil.
And the time was ready for mammals and for humans.
Now if the plants helped build and heal the earth making it possible for an abundant life, does it not seem possible also that the plants could provide additional help for the well-being if the earth's inhabitants?
Certainly!
We are threatening the very organisms that made it possible for us to live here!
But now humans have turned their backs on the plants and sought to "wipe them from the face of the earth" just for greedy and unthinking purposes.
There are 750,000 varieties of plants on the earth today. Perhaps this in only one-third of what was here before. For example, there used to 30,000 different types of apples. But how many can you find in the stores. One news source reported:
The wild fruit tree cousins of Britain's favourite domestic apples are teetering on the brink of global extinction, according to a new report. Around 90 per cent of the fruit and nut forests in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan have been destroyed over the past 50 years. (Telegraph.co.uk, May 8, 2009)
Another report said,
At least one of every eight plant species in the world -- and nearly one of three in the United States -- is under threat of extinction, according to the first comprehensive worldwide assessment of plant endangerment.
The United States' situation looks comparatively grim, said Stein, because plants are probably better surveyed here than elsewhere. With 4,669 species judged to be threatened to one degree or another, the United States ranked first, by far, among the nations of the world in total number of plants at risk. That is 29 percent of the country's 16,108 plant species.
While endangered mammals and birds have commanded more public attention, it is plants, scientists say, that are more fundamental to nature's functioning. They undergird most of the rest of life, including human life, by converting sunlight into food. They provide the raw material for many medicines and the genetic stock from which agricultural strains of plants are developed. And they constitute the very warp and woof of the natural landscape, the framework within which everything else happens.
Of the world's 270,000 known species of plants, the 12.5 percent found to be at risk is a huge proportion, said David Brackett of Ottawa, chairman of the World Conservation Union's Species Survival Commission. Moreover, he said, the figure is probably an underestimate, since data from most places in the world -- including some species-rich tropical nations where the countryside is being rapidly cleared -- are fragmentary.
The new listing of endangered plants is one more piece of evidence that "a whole chunk of creation is at risk," said Dr. Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee. (New York Times, April 9, 1998)
One of the most important factor in making life on the earth possible is being destroyed at an accelerating rate! Without the plants, all life will cease.
But a shortage of the right plants means poor health and disease for billions of people.
Fortunately, at this time supplies of the most important medicinal herbs appears fine, except that among the top 35 plants, four are in the endangered list! These are:
Black Chohosh (Cimicifuga racemosa)
Echinacea (Echinacea purpurea)
Goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis)
Pipsissewa (Chimaphilla umbellata)
In this section of the Innertech blog, I will be concentrating on medicinal herbs, their importance to our health, how to use them, what warnings are associated with taking them (mainly pregnancy issues), how to prepare them, how to store them, and other articles that help understanding, like what role they should play in your overall health maintenance processes.
Please understand that like the rest of the blog I am presenting information. Your health should be your responsibility as a right from the Creator. This is not meant to replace the help you can receive from your physician.