The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth

This could be the most important book you will read this year. Around the office at Chelsea Green it is referred to as the "pharmaceutical Silent Spring." 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:

1. 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.
2. A new look at Gaia Theory, including an explanation that plants are the original chemistries of Gaia and those phytochemistries are the fundamental communications network for the Earth's ecosystems.
3. Extensive documentation of how plants communicate their healing qualities to humans and other animals. Western culture has obliterated most people's capacity to perceive these messages, but this book also contains valuable information on how we can restore our faculties of perception.

The book will affect readers on rational and emotional planes. It is grounded in both a New Age spiritual sensibility and hard science. While some of the author's claims may strike traditional thinkers as outlandish, Buhner presents his arguments with such authority and documentation that the scientific underpinnings, however unconventional, are completely credible.

The overall impact is a powerful, eye-opening expos' of the threat that our allopathic Western medical system, in combination with our unquestioning faith in science and technology, poses to the primary life-support systems of the planet. At a time when we are preoccupied with the terrorist attacks and the possibility of biological warfare, perhaps it is time to listen to the planet. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned about the state of the environment, the state of health care, and our cultural sanity.

Stephen Harrod Buhner is the award-winning, best-selling author of 24 books including The Lost Language of Plants, a BBC Environmental Book of the Year. Stephen is a polymath and autodidact, an independent scholar, a Fellow of Schumacher College, and the senior researcher for the Foundation for Gaian Studies. He has taught and written extensively the past four decades on the ecology of Gaian planetary systems, the rise of antibiotic resistant bacteria, viral pandemics, the dangers of pharmaceuticals in the environment, as well as producing a number of leading-edge clinical texts on the use of plant medicines in the treatment of resistant infections and chronic disease. Stephen also worked for many years as psychotherapist, studying with such luminaries as Elizabeth Kubler Ross and a number of the country's preeminent transactional analysis therapists. He is considered one of the preeminent medical herbalists in the United States. Stephen lives in Silver City, NM. You can read more about him at stephenharrodbuhner.com.