The Wonders of Gaia: Nature is Symbiotic

Why do a garden if you can put the green organism to work for you in your body? This is one of the mind-bending questions Lynn Margulis, one of the greatest scientists, fertile cross-disciplinary scientific thinkers and educators of our epoch, asks. She, ethnobotanist Wade Davis and mycologist Paul Stamets weave tales of amazing plant intelligence like the Hat Thrower Mushroom and animals that eat light. 

Bios: 

Wade Davis Ph.D., Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, is an ethnobotanist, lecturer, photographer and environmental activist who has done extensive field-work throughout the world, and is the best-selling author of, among other works, Passage of Darkness, The Serpent and the Rainbow, One River, and the new The Light at the Edge of the World. A Research Associate of the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, he is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, the Explorer's Club, and the Royal Geographical Society as well as Executive Director of the Endangered People's Project, and a board member of the David Suzuki Foundation, Ecotrust, Future Generations, Cultural Survival and Rivers Canada. 

Paul Stamets, President of Fungi Perfecti, a mail-order business supplying cultures, equipment and mycotechnologies to mushroom cultivators throughout the world, a mycologist for over twenty years, has discovered four new species of mushrooms and pioneered countless techniques in the field of edible and medicinal mushroom cultivation and in "fungal bioremidiation." He has written five books including Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, The Mushroom Cultivator, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, and many articles and scholarly papers. A dedicated hiker, conservationist and explorer, his passion is to preserve, protect, and clone as many ancestral strains of mushrooms as possible from the old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. 

Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), an American evolutionary theorist, biologist, science author, educator, and science popularizer, and was the primary modern proponent for the significance of symbiosis in evolution. 

Bioneers Series III includes the following programs:

• BN301 Part 1: The Duh Principle: Better Safe Than Sorry
• BN302 Part 2: Energy Security: the Growth of Soft Energy
• BN303 Part 3: Light At The Edge of The World: Reinventing The Poetry of Diversity
• BN304 Part 4: Greening Medicine: the Mainstreaming of Herbs
• BN305 Part 5: Soil and Soul: The Future of Farming
• BN306 Part 6: I Heard the Voice Of A Porkchop: The Theoretical Promise Versus The Actual Perils Of Genetically Modified Organisms
• BN307 Part 7: Less Is More : Toward A Zero Discharge Industry
• BN308 Part 8: Daughters of Thoreau: Not Too Well Behaved
• BN309 Part 9: Plants and People: Who's Cultivating Who?
• BN310 Part 10: Getting the Real Story: Bypassing Corporate Media
• BN311 Part 11: Nature As Healer: Restoring Life As Community
• BN312 Part 12: The Wonders of Gaia: Nature is Symbiotic
• BN313 Part 13: Nature and Spirit: It's All Connected 

The Bioneers series consists of three sets of 13 programs each:

Bioneers Series I The Bioneers: Revolution From the Heart of Nature
Bioneers Series II Improving Environment By Changing The World
Bioneers Series III 

Inspired by the philosophies of the Deep Ecology movement, the Bioneers are heroic examples of people living as if nature mattered. Join us as we look deeply into the magic and mystery of the convergence between leading-edge science and ancient wisdom for a Declaration of Interdependence for the new millennium. Though these programs were produced in the 1990s the contents of this series are timelessly relevant. 

HOST: Michael Toms     INTERVIEW DATE: 2002            PROGRAM NUMBER: BN312