016, Marc Williams: People, Plants, and Sustainability

Soul Soil: Where Agriculture and Spirit Intersect with Brooke Kornegay

Humans are unique creatures for many reasons. One of those is our long list of disorders, specifically Nature Deficit Disorder. Most of us are so far removed from our original habitat that we are actually suffering from the absence of plant influences in our lives, and it affects our body, mind, and spirit.

Today we discuss this and much more with Marc Williams, an ethnobiologist who studies the connections between people, plants, mushrooms, and microbes while learning to employ botanicals and other life forms for food, medicine, and beauty. He has spent over two decades working at a multitude of restaurants and various farms and has traveled throughout 30 countries and all 50 U.S. states. Marc is the Executive Director of Plants and Healers International and serves on the Board of Directors of United Plant Savers. Marc has taught hundreds of classes to thousands of students about the marvelous world of people and their interface with other organisms. Marc's greatest hope is that this effort may help improve our current challenging global ecological situation.

In this episode...

• What is ethnobotany?...Marc's path to this work

• Mentor Frank Cook, finding your way to the Green Path

• The impact of food miles and industrially-produced food

• Plants that transcend culture

• Nature Deficit Disorder

• What the natural world can teach us about ourselves

Resource

• Marc's online botany classes: botanyeveryday.com

• Frank Cook's nonprofit organization: Plants and Healers International

• Emerging Planetary Medicines by Frank Cook

• Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv

• Fantastic Fungi movie

• Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification by Thomas Elpel

• Be Here Now by Ram Dass

• Peterson Field Guides

• The Encyclopedia of Edible Plants of North America: Nature's Green Feast by Francois Couplan

• Mabberley's Plant-book: A Portable Dictionary of Plants, their Classification and Uses by David Mabberley

• Flora of the Southern and Mid-Atlantic States by Alan Weakley

• Earth from Above: 365 Days by Yann Arthus-Bertrand

• Appalachian State University Appalachian Studies/Sustainability https://appstudies.appstate.edu/, https://sd.appstate.edu/

• Chestnut School of Herbal medicine https://chestnutherbs.com/

• Society for Economic Botany https://www.econbot.org/

• Suzanne Simard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzanne_Simard

• Vipassana https://www.dhamma.org/en-US/index

• Warren Wilson College https://www.warren-wilson.edu/

• White Sage sustainability https://unitedplantsavers.org/what-is-going-on-with-white-sage/📷