Pathway 01 — ethnobotany
Ethnobotany and Ethnomedicine
From Sumerian clay tablets to the Talking Dictionaries of Vanuatu — Mike Balick traces five millennia of plant-based healing and the urgent work of documenting what time is erasing. Field methodology, biocultural conservation, and the living science of traditional medicine.
● 7 modules
● 19 lessons
● 1 hour
● All levels
Mike Balick, PhD
Ethnobotanist · New York Botanical Garden
course overview
“The users of ethnobotany are communities whose resilience is enhanced and whose lives are more regenerative as a result of our work. This course is about doing that work with rigor, respect, and the humility to understand that the people we sit with in the field almost always know more than we do.”
what you will learn
Trace the documented history of ethnomedicine from Sumerian clay tablets and the Ebers Papyrus through the age of herbals and into contemporary research models
Understand the principles of good botanical practice and why correct plant nomenclature is a matter of life, death, and scientific reproducibility
Examine the ethno-directed sampling hypothesis through Balick’s landmark NCI project in Belize — how traditional use patterns accelerate drug discovery
Analyse case studies from Micronesia and Vanuatu on biocultural conservation, including the Talking Dictionary project and the role of calendar plants as ecological indicators
Understand what ethical collaboration with traditional knowledge holders looks like in practice — including intellectual credit, authorship, and community benefit
Assess the urgent challenge of documentation — why time is of the essence and what is lost when language, culture, and plant knowledge disappear together
course sYllabus
free preview — Module 1 · Lesson 2
watch free
Homage to Richard Evans Schultes
Mike Balick pays tribute to his teacher Richard Evans Schultes — the Harvard botanist who turned a one-year leave of absence into twelve years in the Colombian Amazon. Through this portrait of Schultes, Balick establishes the ethical foundation of the course: that the people we work with in the field almost always know more than we do, and that treating everyone with genuine respect is not just courtesy — it is the condition under which real ethnobotanical knowledge becomes possible.
aprox: 3 minutes
about the instructor
Mike Balick, PhD
Ethnobotanist · New York Botanical Garden · Columbia University
Mike Balick has spent nearly four decades studying the relationship between plants and people across tropical, subtropical, and desert environments. As Vice President for Botanical Science and Director of the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden — where he has worked for over 41 years — he has led major field projects in Belize, Micronesia, Vanuatu, and more than twenty other countries. His work sits at a specific intersection that few occupy: rigorous scientific documentation, primary healthcare delivery, and biocultural conservation that keeps traditional knowledge holders at the centre of the research process. He is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia University, Fordham University, and CUNY, and a student of Richard Evans Schultes. His lesson is that the people you sit with in the field know more than you do — and that the only ethical response to that is to say so.
Biocultural conservation
Ethnomedicine
Field methodology
this course in context
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