11.01 The Science of Yin & Yang - by Lynda E. LeMole, Executive Director of United Plant Savers

Review:

Speaker: Lynda E. LeMole, Executive Director of United Plant Savers

www.unitedplantsavers.org

Last week we had a charming visitation from the plant world. Lynda LeMole, executive director of United Plant Savers came to set us straight about the precarious condition of so many medicinal herbs here in North America. In a society where huge profits are reaped from merely advertising "The Little Purple Pill" without once saying what the little pill might do for you (my doctor simply had a bowl of them set out at Halloween with the jelly beans) we have come to regard medicinal herbs with suspicion and even disdain.

But the array of herbs which are thought (with good reason) to have medicinal properties is dwindling from a variety of causes. Sometimes they are merely over-harvested, as with plants that are too good, or they may vanish because their niche is so interdependent with other vanished plants. However, Ms. LeMole did a fine job of outlining the task at hand and the good work performed already.

Many pharmaceuticals derive directly from plants or are inspired by them. If Lynda and her gang of Plant Savers and their plant saviors are successful the day could come went peddlers of mugwort drive Jaguars and the pharmaceutical firms are holding bake sales to keep the lights on. But don't wait up.

Preview:

Lynda LeMole comes to us on November 1 to talk about the Science of Yin and Yang. Science, in its relentless pursuit to boil the complexities of the world down to its irreducible fundamentals (all the while seeming to make it less accessible with its fancy schmancy talk) has long contemplated pairs of opposites: mass and energy. Time and space. Electricity and magnetism. Girls and boys. The mind seems to crave schemes that can sort out our observations and experiences of life only to find that we have produced a new system that makes the uninitiated look askance when confronted with terms and concepts that don't seem simple. An interviewer, Edward R Morrow, once asked J Robert Oppenheimer about the rumor that he wrote Sanskrit poetry. Yes, he confessed that he did. Morrow said he could not grok this because, "Science attempts to take the obscure and make it clear, while POETRY! . . ." Perhaps Lynda will succeed where Oppie could not.