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<div>While nursery people and landscapers have been the targets of nativist criticism lately, notably Douglas W. Tallamy's <i>Bringing Nature Home, </i>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div><div><br></div><div>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?</div><div><br></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; text-indent: 0px; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; text-transform: none; orphans: 2; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; "><div>Jean Giblette, Owner</div><div>HIGH FALLS GARDENS</div><div>Box 125 Philmont NY 12565</div><div>518-672-7365, <a href="mailto:hfg@capital.net">hfg@capital.net</a></div><div>www.highfallsgardens.net</div><div><br class="khtml-block-placeholder"></div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"> </div><br></div></body></html>