The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines for Life on Earth
This could be the most important book you will read this year. Well-known author, teacher, lecturer, and herbalist Stephen Harrod Buhner has produced a book that is certain to generate controversy. It consists of three parts: A critique of technological medicine, and especially the dangers to the environment posed by pharmaceuticals and other synthetic substances that people use in connection with health care and personal body care. A new look at Gaia Theory, including an expl…
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This is one of the best books I have read in a long time. Thoughtful, poignant, well written, it even brought me to tears at some points. I learned so many things I didn’t know, which doesn’t happen for me very often, sad to say. I have a pretty good idea how destructive man has been to the environment, but there were chapters in this book that opened my eyes even further, particularly when it comes to the ripple effect of the pharmaceutical industry.
But more than that, the author discusses with due respect the indigenous history of working with plants and how dismissing that history in the name of profit, power and control serves no one.
This book is truly a labor of love that speaks from every page. I had no idea what a page-turner it would turn out to be. Consider yourself forewarned.
…geminiwalker
A couple of summers ago, in the midst of a blackberry glut, I decided I should harvest some Oregon Grape berries to mix with blackberry for a good, sour jelly. But I needed a whole patch, and a few individual plants were all I knew. Before I got around to looking, I found myself on a walk, huffing and puffing up my favorite steep hill. In the middle, I just stopped – for no obvious reason – and looked up. All around me, in the midst of the salal, was a thicket of Oregon Grape, laden with berries! My brother-in-law and I came back and filled up buckets. The deep purple, astringent berries made a stunning blend with the blackberries, and the jelly set up beautifully. But most stunning, even after we ate it all up, was how the plant showed itself in a place I’d been through a hundred times before without ever noticing it.
Is that language? Maybe not But even if it only meant that I could make my jelly, it did have meaning, and to convey meaning is, after all, the purpose of language. The Lost Language of Plants is a book about meaning: not whether plants speak, or even how they speak, but what they say to us and we to them.
Buhner says there is meaning to Life, and that plants communicate it clearly and fully through their chemistry and biology. In human industrial culture, however, the common values of Life – birth, growth, death, and renewal – have mutated into progress, wealth, and poverty – the trinity of economic growth. As a result, billions of years of evolution are being pushed to favor waste over renewal, and death over Life. Under human control, Life is a mere by-product of a soul-less, cosmic machine that happens to have produced “resources” that we can consume until they’re gone or until Life ends, whichever comes first.
“Imagine a ball of twine the exact size and shape of Earth,” Buhner writes; “Better yet, telephone line. Take the end point of the line and weave it back into the beginning so that there is no beginning and no end. Every place the line crosses itself (you could think of them as synaptic junctions) messages cross over; communication travels quickly throughout the entire line itself as well. Academic disciplines are areas where a segment of line is cut out of the ball and studied. They explore its tensile strength, its molecular structure, its chemical composition, the colors and types of wires that run through it. Any communications that were flowing or might flow through it cannot be studied once it is cut out of the whole-only a tiny part of the picture can be seen. Misunderstandings easily arise, especially if the communications that flow through the line are the most important thing.
“Turn the ball of telephone line back into Earth. Each plant, plant neighborhood, plant community, ecosystem, and biome has messages flowing through it constantly-trillions and trillions of messages at the same time. The messages are complex communications between all the different parts of the ecosystem. There is no beginning and no end, no cause and no effect. The three-and-a-half-billion-year-old feedback loops of Earth are so closely intertwined that there is always another cause underneath whatever cause you begin with. Impacts at any one point affect every other point in the system. Life is so closely coupled with the physical and chemical environment of which it is a part that the two cannot legitimately be viewed in isolation from one another. As James Lovelock says: `Together they constitute a single evolutionary process, which is self-regulating.’” (p 172)
If, as Buhner suggests, we are the language, and the language is us, and the meaning of that language is the beauty of Life itself, then redemption is not an airy philosophical postulate, but an experimental result within the realm of reason and, perhaps, within the realm of possibility.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exceptional
This book has blown my mind. It’s the kind of book that leads to connections, to questions and to a wider, more connected perception of life.
Stephen tackles the prescription drug industry without painting a doom and gloom scenario. He presents facts in a loving way so that the reader can understand why plants are important. Stephen sees a problem and offers a solution. A great book for anyone worried about prescription drugs, on prescription drugs, or interested in plants.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inside the cosmic architecture of Nature
This book is profound. Revelatory. A book brimming with knowledge both detailed and all encompassing, full of wonder, each answer leading to more questions about the totality of…
5.0 out of 5 stars
I just want to add my personal take…
I won’t go into what the other reviewers have already said about the beauty and sensitivity of this book.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Compassion for Plants
The beginning of the book held my interest, but then it waned. Somehow I just lost interest and still have not finished it. But I will try.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent and thoughtful reading!
This book is a change of pace. It is a book that makes you ponder about life itself.
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Beautiful and Poetic Call to Action
This book is absolutely wonderful and exquisitely written. I loved the author’s writing style, but especially appreciated his much-needed message.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Powerful and Profound
This is a staggeringly powerful and important book. Our relationship with the earth and all of its inhabitants is crucial to our continued biological, psychological and spiritual…
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sees plants as sentient beings adjusting to the environment
We are polluting the environment with pharmaceuticals developed to heal, and are losing the planet’s natural healers and stabilizers in the process.
5.0 out of 5 stars
The “Silent Spring” for our times
This is a book you should read, and unlike many “should” reads, this one is a real pleasure.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Facinating, Informative, Eye-Opening
Fascinating, informative and eye-opening, “The Lost Language of Plants” by Stephen Buhner shows us the life of evolving plant chemistries, revealing the science in the `magic’ of…