> We don't even know what we're missing.

The plants that are being neglected aren't unknown, they are just not as useful

> Jfc. Plants aren't just for food.

Nobody said they were. Stop inventing strawman arguments

> indigenous people dwindle from the planet, their knowledge of useful plants disappears and their potential becomes lost on us.

Source required. What important plant knowledge is being lost?

We literally do not know what we lost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putumayo_genocide

When rubber industrialists wiped out the people living in the area, those that remained lost generational knowledge. Ethnobotanists like Shultes explored the Amazon afterwards.

There's even a movie made on the subject of exploring the Amazon for medicines with Sean Connery, Medicine Man. Also, the more recent Embrace of the Serpent.

When you personally are sick do you go to a doctor or to a shaman?

Medicine we have now is orders of magnitude better than what indigenous people could ever dream of.

GP was not talking about herbal remedies. Many modern medicines are derived from or inspired by plants.

https://www.thoughtco.com/drugs-and-medicine-made-from-plant...

He specifically mentioned dwindling indigenous people and their somehow unique knowledge.

The plant derived medicines come from plants known to indigenous people to have activity. If there's no indigenous knowledge available there's no way to study the plants and make modern medicines.

Of course you can still study plants and make medicines. That's exactly what your indigenous people supposedly did in the past, didn't they?

And if they did it then there's absolutely no reason to think that modern pharma can't produce the same knowledge. And the whole assumption that there is a body of invaluable knowledge somewhere, held by indigenous people but somehow unavailable to modern science is very strange.