Michael J. Balick, Vice President for Botanical Science, The New York Botanical Garden 

For more than four decades, Michael Balick has studied the relationships between plants and people—the field known as ethnobotany—in the Amazon Valley, Central and South America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and most recently in Micronesia and Melanesia. In this lecture he will discuss the relevance of working with indigenous cultures to document their knowledge of medicinal plants and evaluate their potential for broader applications. He will also highlight some of the medicinal plants used by non-Western cultures, such as ashwagandha and maca, which are becoming available and popular in the West and are discussed in his most recent book, Rodale’s 21st Century Herbal: A Practical Guide for Healthy Living Using Nature’s Most Powerful Plants.

Lecture and Book Signing.