Marooned!

…From Noni: The Complete Guide for Consumers and Growers by Scot C. Nelson and Craig R. Elevitch –

In a sense, the human race is marooned on a small island in a vast sea of space. The island is called Earth. On this island, we depend on plants for survival. The existence of the human species is made possible by our intelligent use and understanding of the plant kingdom. On a smaller and more literal scale, this is also true for islands in the tropics as well.

Imagine that you are shipwrecked and marooned on a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean. In order to survive you will need water, food, first aid, fire, and tools. You are injured, thirsty, hungry, afraid, and desperate.

Hardly able to move, you stretch your arm across the rocky beach and grab onto an odd-looking, lumpy, soft, smelly, yellowish fruit at the base of a tree growing on the beach. You hold the fruit to your parched lips; the cool liquid seeps from within, quenching your thirst. You notice immediately that the pain of your cracked lips is eased. You eat the whole fruit and fall asleep, wondering briefly if the odd fruit has sedative properties.

You awake feeling refreshed. You drag yourself to the shade of a coastal tree with large, green, glossy leaves, and stinking fruit. You pick up more of the fruits and rub a ripe one on your injured leg; the pain subsides and the wound tingles with healing energy. You notice a fruit with the tooth marks of a rat, and you think of spearing one of the pests with a stick from this strange tree and roasting it over the coals of a fire made from its wood.

After locating a piece of sharp, angular basaltic rock, you lash the stone to a stem of this tree and secure it with strong grasses, making a temporary axe for construction and self-defense. You use sticks from the plant to dig holes. You find much later that when you grind the seeds of this plant between rocks and apply the mixture to your scalp, the troublesome lice are finally repelled. It occurs to you that this odd plant could well have saved your life.

The plant’s leaves and fruits sustain you until the island’s vegetation can recover from the effects of the storm that sank your ship and also blew down most of the trees on the island (but not this odd plant). You recognize that the plant (and there are many of them along the coast) can provide for you a renewable supply of many things required for your immediate survival.

This odd plant that saved your life is noni, one of the outstanding multipurpose plants used by man.

Excerpted from Noni: The Complete Guide for Consumers and Growers by Scot C. Nelson and Craig R. Elevitch. Nelson is a botanist and plant pathologist, and Elevitch is an agroforestry specialist who has edited or co-authored several books about trees of Hawai‘i and the Pacific. Noni: The Complete Guide is available in local bookstores, from Amazon.com, Google Editions, and from Nonithecompleteguide.com.

Photos by Scot C. Nelson and Craig R. Elevitch