Plants as cultural touchstone revealed in Occidental

The class that assembled Sunday at the Occidental Center for the Arts included amateur herbalists, artists, psychotherapists, ecologists and several people interested in shamanism.

They brought with them a love of plant life and a deep sense of curiosity about humankind’s historical utilization of the Earth’s flora, especially its uses for medicine, mood regulation, vision-seeking and ritualism.

Enter Kathleen “Kat“ Harrison, an educator and 40-year resident of Sonoma County whose study of human cultural relationships with plants and mushrooms has taken her around the world and provided a particular expertise in indigenous traditions involving psychoactive plant ingredients, mythology, cultural rites and beliefs.

She is what one of her students and friends, Kerry Brady, described as “an elder gem” in Sonoma County, though she spends extended periods in Hawaii and elsewhere.

In addition to speaking internationally, Harrison, 69, runs workshops out of the Occidental Center for the Arts, through Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit she and her late husband started in 1985.

She also operates the organization’s 3-year-old Ethnobotany Library there, begun with a huge collection of her own books and now 1,000 volumes strong.

Harrison describes ethnobotany as the study of how humans have depended throughout their existence on plants for food, shelter, clothing, storytelling, spiritual practice and a host of other uses, and how that multidimensional connection frames each culture’s view of nature.

She’s also focused on efforts to preserve longtime traditions at risk of extinction as cultural evolution and technology move people away from long-held customs.

Her class Sunday was the first of four monthly sessions stretching into July that form a course called Global Ethnobotany with a Local Focus, one combining stories from her fieldwork, her understanding of cultural practices around the planet, and an intimate look at native California ethnobotany and how it fits into universal patterns.

Speaking in what Harrison describes as her own “spiraling style of delivery,” she talked at one point about the aromatic “mugwort” plant, passing a frond of the local species hand-to-hand through the class so each student could inhale its refreshing fragrance.

Part of the Artemisia family of plants that include bitter herbs used in various countries to treat malaria, fever, parasites and trauma, she reflected on the connection between its value and the mythology of the huntress Artemis, from which its name derives.

“The tendency to personify the natural world is a good lens to consider when trying to understand another world view,” she said.

Brock Dolman, director and co-founder of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center and a well-known local expert in permaculture and environmental resilience, attended Saturday’s class and described Harrison as having a unique, multidimensional understanding of her subject while combining storytelling with “serious, academic, rigorous” views.

“I moved here in the ’90s, and she was already an established institution,” Dolman said.

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com.