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A long-time Maryknoll friend puts into practice Pope Francis’ call to protect our Common Home through ancestral indigenous knowledge.

Listening is an important element of Pope Francis’ call to care for our Common Home. How will we care without listening? How can we understand the needs of Mother Earth if we don’t listen when it cries out? When the poor cry out? How will we change our habits if we don’t learn what nature is trying to teach us?

In Bolivia, one man’s mission has been to prick up his ears and listen to plants, learning from them and bringing that knowledge to the rest of the planet.

Carlos Prado Mendoza is a Quechua traditional practitioner renowned in Bolivia and abroad. More than 30 years ago, he, along with Maryknoll Brother Lawrence Kenning, began designing a garden with a diverse range of medicinal plants and trees in our property. That project continues to this day at the Maryknoll Botanical Garden in the city of Cochabamba, and was inaugurated under that name in 2023.

I got back in touch with Carlos a couple years ago, and we decided to journey together again in response to Pope Francis’ invitation to sow the seeds of a “green” spirituality.

Carlos is director of the Kuska Cultural Center for Ancestral Wisdoms (Kuska means “together” in Quechua). The mission of the center is the dissemination and preservation of ancestral knowledge about traditional medicine.

In order to preserve that human patrimony, with Carlos’ help, and along with Maryknoll Seminarian Leonard Kabaka, we created a catalogue of all the medicinal plants in the garden at the Maryknoll center in Cochabamba. Carlos and Maryknoll Seminarian Barrack Odeka Auka built a greenhouse to grow new species and multiply native varieties for Cochabamba’s botanical garden and a reforestation of the Bolivian Amazon project.

We also began an herbal pharmacy with the aim of helping the community, especially in preventing respiratory illnesses and post-COVID depression.

“After the pandemic we have to ask, ‘What are we doing to offer an alternative to the population?’” says Carlos. “What we eat should be related to natural products and to the care of our environment. We have to prevent both environmental and mental pollution.”

With that goal in mind, we arrange guided talks with the subject “Listening to the Wisdom of Plants.” Carlos works with various groups, presenting different plants and teaching about their benefits.

“What we are doing,” Carlos explains, “is recovering the knowledge of our ancestors for this modern society that’s losing its spiritual values.”

His ancestral wisdom, Carlos says, comes via oral tradition from his parents and grandparents and through his own academic studies and research. The World Health Organization estimates that about 80% of the global population makes use of traditional medicine. In 2022, the WHO opened the first Global Traditional Medicine Centre in India.

From Carlos and the plants, we have learned that plants like to be surrounded by species different from their own, and that they need each other’s company to be stronger. When they cohabit, plants draw nutrients from the earth at different depths, which they then share through an intertwined underground network.

How would this world change if we listened to this wisdom and learned that coexistence with different people and all living things always enriches and strengthens us?

Carlos explains that this ancestral cosmovision “is in agreement, in relationship and in interaction with everything that exists in this world.” Likewise, Pope Francis offers that we should transition from the utilitarian logic of exploiting the earth until it is depleted and discarded, to a logic of gratitude and reciprocity. “We all have ears,” says the pope, “but many times even those with perfect hearing are unable to hear another person. In fact, there is an interior deafness worse than the physical one.”

Through our inter-institutional alliance and with listening hearts, Carlos, I, and other missioner friends are learning to listen to the wisdom of plants to cultivate nature’s values of gratitude and reciprocity within our population and communities.

Featured Image: Carlos Prado Mendoza, a speaker, author and practitioner of traditional medicine, has expertise in horticulture. Pictured in 2023 at the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers center in Cochabamba, Bolivia, he is an internationally known for his work in recovering Indigenous ancestral wisdom. (Adam Mitchell/Bolivia)