Book Review : The Lost Language of Plants

Book Reviewed: The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicine to Life on Earth

Author: Stephen Harrod Buhner

As the author points out early in his book "this is a book about feelings" as well as ideas. Mr. Buhner"s central thesis is that as humanity gradually adopts increasingly limiting epistemologies, as depicted early on by Descartes" "I think therefore I am", thereby effectively excising human feelings from what it means to be human, and more recently through the adoption of evidence based scientific/medical reductionism philosophies, it finds itself increasingly disconnected from its rightful place as an integral part of Nature. In doing so it begins to perceive the nature around it as alien to itself, potentially threatening, and as a force that needs to be controlled and/or exploited to secure its survival needs.

Humanity thus proceeds to the wound Nature and also blindly wounds itself. Mr Buhner, having cultivated his sensitivity to his environment through his own personal life journey, points out that such internal wounds do not go unfelt in the human heart and that such inner pain will ultimately rise in the personal (and collective) conscious awareness to help remind us of our artificial disconnection thereby helping to restore inner emotional and outer environmental harmony.

Throughout the book he gives examples of a) how scientific epistemology is disrupting the wisdom and internal communication mechanisms inherent in Nature, and b) ways in which we can re-establish harmony through exercises in "Biophilia" (i.e. love of plants and Nature herself) that will reawaken the ancestral and natural epistemology that comes from one"s direct heart felt experience of Nature itself.

I found this book to be extremely moving and relevant to the practice of Naturopathic Medicine in that it reawakens in our consciousness the connection with the greater Consciousness of which we all are part the Vis Medicatrix Naturae.

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