Christian Kull

You know how sometimes a word or thing appears at the margins of your conscience, associated with some value (good, bad, …), but where you really know nothing about it? For me, this describes ravintsara. Long interested in the Malagasy environment, it is perhaps natural that a tree with a name like that would catch my attention (even a beginner in Malagasy will get that it means “good leaf”). While doing research on fire, agrarian change, and highland reforestation, ravintsara crossed my path plenty in the late 1990s and 2000s, but it was never centre stage. I first encountered it knowingly in 2014, when friends showed me some they had planted a few to ornament their land outside Antananarivo, and they were proud to have something native and not pine or eucalyptus. But strangely, its name was already there in a list of 1000s of plants in an inventory of introduced species in Madagascar that colleagues and I put together. And then since moving to Europe I started noticing ravintsara in the essential oils section of French pharmacies.

Chanelle Adam’s PhD, just defended, shows there is history and reason behind my encounters and confusions. It turns out that the botanical and chemical identity of the tree has only been established for three decades or so. Ravintsara was indeed introduced to Madagascar, probably in the 19th century (it is better known elsewhere as the camphor laurel, Camphora officinarum, source of camphor oil). And yet… the variety growing in Madagascar turns out to be a chemotype specific to Madagascar called 1,8-cineole, which is low in camphor oil and high in cineole (also found in eucalypts, rosemary, and bay leaves). To confuse matters further, the endemic tree Cryptocarya agathophylla (also used for essential oils) was previously called ravensara (though not by locals) and confusion between two persists. As environmental programs proliferated on the island in the 1990s and 2000s, the search was on for local trees to reforest the island, and ravensara/ravintsara was a prime candidate (hence my encounter on my friends’ plot in the peripheries of Tana). And with development programs entering the 2000s looking for “win-win” solutions for both environment and livelihoods, essential oil distillation was widely promoted – especially as local distillers and scientists (perhaps benefitting from long-term French investments and know-how in the fragrance, oil, and pharmaceutical arena) had set the groundwork in previous decades, themselves building on and branching from colonial era industries (ylang-ylang, cloves, vanilla…). Hence the little ravintsara bottles in French pharmacies. This all leads up to the opening scene of Chanelle’s thesis, the time when during the height of the Covid 19 crisis the just-deposed President of Madagascar himself claimed to have a cure for the coronavirus – a concoction based in part on ravintsara. And that’s a story that Chanelle tells much better than me!