[MPWG] White List

[Jean Giblette]

While nursery people and landscapers have been the targets of  
nativist criticism lately, notably Douglas W. Tallamy's Bringing  
Nature Home, we depend on nursery/seed companies as key allies in the  
effort to establish an authentic, efficacious practice of plant  
medicine in North America.  I'm thinking especially of our expert and  
hard-working colleagues Richo Cech and Conrad Richter.  We have been  
working with them for 20 years now, while traditional east Asian  
medicine with its long-standing and vast empirical records (AND its  
plant species, many of which are close analogs of our own), have  
become assimilated into American society.  In other words, we need  
the Chinese scholarship and to learn from their plants in order to  
develop our own system that transcends the drug model.

Responsible plant importers deserve our continued support just as  
much as do our local farmers.  Do you think they're unrelated?  Seems  
to me the White List is yet another variation on a theme, which  
includes the NAIS (National Animal Identification System), the state  
and FDA-led campaigns against raw milk, the noxious S510 "Food  
Safety" bill pending in the Senate.  This is classic monopolistic  
behavior, the consolidation of power unchecked by anti-trust  
legislation, by which large corporate interests use the federal  
government as an agent to eliminate the competition.

Any pro-social cover story such as "food safety" or "prevention of  
contamination" is increasingly thinly veiled as more and more people  
catch on to the underlying dynamic.  The consolidation is vertically  
integrated:  we get sick from industrial food, then they "treat" us  
with industrial medicine while cleaning out our bank accounts.  The  
Big Pharma dinosaur has the European herbalists in a twist (ref. the  
EU Traditional Herbal Medicinal Products Directive), is North America  
next?

Jean Giblette, Owner
HIGH FALLS GARDENS
Box 125 Philmont NY 12565
518-672-7365, hfg at capital.net
www.highfallsgardens.net




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.plantconservation.org/pipermail/mpwg_lists.plantconservation.org/attachments/20101025/adbfa7c1/attachment.html>