Rating: 
Summary: listening to plants
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: A Pharmaceutical Silent Spring
Review: A Pharmaceutical Silent Spring
. . . is what the publisher calls Stephen Buhner's new book, and they're right: The Lost Language of Plants is a book that everyone needs to read. The USGS has just published a study about traceable quantities of commonly prescribed and over-the-counter drugs (not to mention bug sprays, soaps, lotions, and other personal care products) polluting the water. Researchers are still determining how these contaminants affect the environment, but it's clear that they are having a drastic impact on habitats and the health of humans and the planet alike. Stephen Buhner provides a more detailed synthesis of this data than I've been able to find in any other book. Our bodies do not absorb all the synthetic chemicals we pour into them, and we end up peeing drugs into our waterways. Buhner documents how hormones from birth control pills are altering the gender of fish; how chemotherapy drugs too toxic to be handled regularly get flushed into the regular sewage; how all kinds of bacteria are developing resistance faster than scientists can develop new antibiotics because of the loads of antibiotics fed to humans(and especially livestock) unnecessarily. This information is chilling, especially if, like me, you're moved to take a good look at your medicine cabinet. But medicine saves lives, right? We need it, don't we? Buhner questions this assumption. If we're going to solve America's legal drug problem, we're going to have to look at health and "cures" differently. Buhner suggests, with passionate conviction, that we start by trying to view ourselves as parts of our ecosystem, as equal partners in the health of the
planet with plants and animals. Earth evolved over millenia with plants serving as the chemical catalysts that kept ecosystems healthy and in balance. These same plants have served as medicines for people since the beginning of Homo sapiens as a species. It's only in the 20th century that Western science began to presume that humans could control, replicate, and synthesize the chemical properties of plants. It's time that we recognized that our knowledge is shallow and that to really learn how the earth works we need to listen to our elders--the plants--just as our ancestors once did, and as some surviving indigenous peoples do today. Buhner believes that it is possible for us to change our paradigm of how the world works, and
begins to point the way. The survival of the living world depends on our taking his advice.
Rating:
Summary: Facinating, Informative, Eye-Opening
Review: 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 plants used as medicine by 4 of 5 people on the planet. A merciless exposé following the path of medical effluence through our soil, water, and air clearly illustrates effects on molecules as they change to affect generations to come... generations of all life: bacteria, plants, wildlife, and humans, as we reproduce. We have been participants in a medical experiment of reductionist technology for a few hundred years and the results are not widely known or circulated. Buhner's well-researched and brilliantly conceived presentation refutes any denial one may have harbored before reading this book.
Western thinking has its own way of seeing things and we live in the cradle of all that it produces. We see ourselves as an advanced society and display little use or respect for our elders, or those who have gone before us. Buhner's language unveils the illusion embedded within our language and our thinking, embodies ancient understanding and functional relationships, and reveals the complex communication between all parts of the eco-system. Stephen Buhner, as scientist, intellectual, storyteller and shaman, teaches us a language so that we may see differently. This is a passionate call to reconnect to our biocentric origins, to nature, to save our planet and ourselves.
Rating:
Summary: Facinating, Informative, Eye-Opening
Review: 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 plants used as medicine by 4 of 5 people on the planet. A merciless exposé following the path of medical effluence through our soil, water, and air clearly illustrates effects on molecules as they change to affect generations to come... generations of all life: bacteria, plants, wildlife, and humans, as we reproduce. We have been participants in a medical experiment of reductionist technology for a few hundred years and the results are not widely known or circulated. Buhner's well-researched and brilliantly conceived presentation refutes any denial one may have harbored before reading this book.
Western thinking has its own way of seeing things and we live in the cradle of all that it produces. We see ourselves as an advanced society and display little use or respect for our elders, or those who have gone before us. Buhner's language unveils the illusion embedded within our language and our thinking, embodies ancient understanding and functional relationships, and reveals the complex communication between all parts of the eco-system. Stephen Buhner, as scientist, intellectual, storyteller and shaman, teaches us a language so that we may see differently. This is a passionate call to reconnect to our biocentric origins, to nature, to save our planet and ourselves.
Rating:
Summary: PROFOUNDLY INSPIRING
Review: I am deeply moved and inspired by the eloquence,the well thought out and researched information and the insights of The Lost Language of Plants. I find myself enthralled. The author writes intelligently and with obvious caring for the Earth. He takes us out of our normal, narrow perspective of the way life appears to be and gives a broader view of reality that gives hope. He offers solutions for the serious problems of the degradation of the Earth so that we don't just have to be shocked into awareness of the problem, but so we can do something about it, even in our daily lives. He teaches us about the ancient language of plants and how we, too, can learn it. I am thankful to find something so well-written about a subject that affects our lives, the lives of our children and their children and all of the life on the planet.
Rating:
Summary: This book is a mind altering substance...
Review: I am halfway through this book and plan to start right over again when I'm finished. I think that this is one of the most fascinating things I have ever read. BUT, if you asked me what it is about I'd have a hard time explaining it. Yes, it is about how chemicals are seeping into the ecosystem, and how we might view plant medicine as an alternative etc, but it's about so much more than that. It's scientific and shamanistic at the same time, merging two ways of thinking into one. Really I should say, it explains one type of epistemology in the language of another. I really like it and it's changing my way of looking at the life around me. Also, my perception of God/spirituality etc. Check it out. PS. Mr Buhner thanks for such an interesting and thought provoking read! You are so right! KM
Rating:
Summary: An Astonishing Work!
Review: I didn't know what to expect when I picked up this book - the cover pulled me in. What I found was incredible! This book is an amazing blend of personal stories, poetry, and a deep analysis of the underlying reasons for the escalating human damage to the natural world. But the author doesn't stop there - he takes us even further, into solutions to the problems that face us as a species. He reveals the amazing language of plants - a language that human beings have always been able to tap into. And he shows how our modern emphasis on defining the world as a machine of interchangeable parts causes tremendous problems. The book explores how our machine analogy of the universe has led to the rise of pharmaceuticals in medicine and he explores, as I have seen nowhere else, the frightening impacts of pharmaceuticals in the environment - many of which exceed agrochemicals in quantity. He contrasts this with plant medicines - ecological medicines - and reveals how plants have been used for medicine for millennia - how plants can alter their chemistries based on the information they receive from their surroundings - how they maintain all the earth ecosystems. The book outlines many exercises to help restore the ability to understand plant language and ends with stories from four environmental activists who also hear and understand the language of plants: John Seed in Australia, Rosemary Gladstar in Vermont, Carol McGrath in British Columbia, and Sparrow in Ecuador. This book truly is poetry and medicine for the soul.
Rating:
Summary: AN INCREDIBLE BOOK!
Review: One of the most important books I have read all year. THe author explores how we can deepen our relationship to the earth, how we can become more whole and holy. He reveals how pharmaceuticals are destroying the environment. More than this his stories are poetry and very moving. A MOST IMPORTANT BOOK FOR EVERYONE TO READ.
Rating:
Summary: Have you ever tasted wild water?
Review: Stephen Buhner asks us, "Have you ever tasted wild water?" This is the question of heart in his book. From his own life he tells of his experiences with the world around us; his taste of wild water. It is poetic and beautiful and makes one long for a similar experience. He goes on to explain what we have done to our environment that has affected the wild waters, plants, animals and land. Even simple things such as taking an aspirin affects the world around us. He shows why it is important to realize that we must be in relationship with the earth/water around us. Most importantly he explains how to attain that relationship. Simple things that anyone can do. It is a beautiful, poetic book of great substance and heart.
Rating:
Summary: The Title Says it All
Review: 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.
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