Human uses of living things
Human uses of living things, including animals, plants, fungi, and microbes, take many forms, both practical, such as the production of food and clothing, and symbolic, as in art, mythology, and religion.
Social sciences including archaeology, anthropology and ethnography are starting to take a multispecies view of human interactions with nature, in which living things are not just resources to be exploited, practically or symbolically, but are involved as participants.
Yeast, a fungus, has been used to ferment cereals such as wheat and barley to make bread and beer; other fungi such as Psilocybe and fly agaric mushrooms have been gathered as psychoactive drugs.
Scholars have traditionally divided uses of animals,[1] plants,[2] and other living things into two categories: practical use for food[3] and other resources; and symbolic use such as in art[4] and religion.
[5] More recently, scholars have added a third type of interaction, where living things, whether animals,[6] plants,[7] fungi or microbes function as participants.
The major staples include cereals such as rice and wheat, starchy roots and tubers such as cassava and potato, and legumes such as peas and beans.
[16] Plants grown as industrial crops are the source of a wide range of products used in manufacturing, sometimes so intensively as to risk harm to the environment.
[17] Nonfood products include essential oils, natural dyes, pigments, waxes, resins, tannins, alkaloids, amber and cork.
Products derived from plants include soaps, shampoos, perfumes, cosmetics, paint, varnish, turpentine, rubber, latex, lubricants, linoleum, plastics, inks, and gums.
[18][19] The fossil fuels coal, petroleum and natural gas are derived from the remains of aquatic organisms including phytoplankton in geological time.
Animals such as the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, the zebrafish, the chicken and the house mouse, serve a major role in science as experimental models,[32] both in fundamental biological research, such as in genetics,[33] and in the development of new medicines, which must be tested exhaustively to demonstrate their safety.
[44] Since classical times and possibly much earlier, hundreds of species of plants have provided drugs to treat a wide range of conditions.
Dioscorides's De Materia Medica, written by 70 AD, listed some 600 medicinal plants and around 1000 drugs made from them, including substances known to be effective such as aconite, aloes, colocynth, colchicum, henbane, opium and squill.
[51] Both animals and plants are used to provide pleasure, through a range of activities including keeping pets, hunting, fishing, and gardening.
Animals, often mammals but including fish and insects among other groups, have been the subjects of art from the earliest times, in both early history as in Ancient Egypt, and prehistory, as in the cave paintings at Lascaux and other sites in the Dordogne, France and elsewhere.
Major artistic depictions of animals include Albrecht Dürer's 1515 The Rhinoceros, and George Stubbs's c. 1762 horse portrait Whistlejacket.
Animals as varied as bees, beetles, mice, foxes, crocodiles and elephants play a wide variety of roles in literature and film.
[72] A genre of films has been based on oversized insects, including the pioneering 1954 Them!, featuring giant ants mutated by radiation, and the 1957 The Deadly Mantis.
[82] J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional world Middle-earth features many named kinds of plant, including the healing herb athelas[83] the yellow star-flower elanor which grows in special places such as Cerin Amroth in Lothlórien,[84] and the tall mallorn tree[85] of the elves.
[102] Among the insects, in both Japan and Europe, as far back as ancient Greece and Rome, a butterfly was seen as the personification of a person's soul, both while they were alive and after their death.
[111][112][113] Plants including trees are important in mythology and religion, where they symbolise themes such as fertility, growth, immortality and rebirth, and may be more or less magical.
The lotus is one of the Ashtamangala (eight auspicious signs) shared between Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism, representing the primordial purity of body, speech, and mind, floating above the muddy waters of attachment and desire.
[128] Social sciences including anthropology, ethnography, and archaeology have long investigated human interactions with living things.
Anthropology and ethnography have traditionally studied these interactions in two opposed ways: as physical resources that humans used;[3] and as symbols or concepts through totemism and animism.
[8][7][129] The anthropologists S. Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich wrote: Creatures previously appearing on the margins of anthropology—as part of the landscape, as food for humans, as symbols—have been pressed into the foreground in recent ethnographies.
[9]Whereas historically, Birch states, humans saw themselves as exceptional, such as in the medieval great chain of being, an integrated multispecies approach would assemble expertise "in diverse areas, including archaeology, human-animal studies, biology, ecology, evolutionary theory, and philosophy".
