WHO WE ARE
Credit: Earth Aware Editions / The Lost Amazon / Wade Davis
Ethnobotany is a discipline-bridging science, including botany, phytochemistry, medicine, anthropology, and as practiced in the Amazon Basin, incorporating plant extracts in the category that has come to be known as entheogens. Here in the Amazon, where people claim to get knowledge directly from the plants themselves, and consider them maestras, or teachers, the ancient traditions and human-plant relations are still vibrant and very much alive. Coupled with the awe-inspiring biodiversity of the rainforest, there is a lot to be learned, and the Richard Evans Schultes Center for Amazonian Ethnobotanical Research aims to become a leading center of study that integrates indigenous tradition, direct experience, and world class scientific research and experimentation to learn from the plant world and to share that learning and its many benefits with the world at large.
Dr. Dennis McKenna, Our Chief Science Officer
We are a group of scientists from a number of disciplines, writers, and students of life who share a deep bioethical devotion to the belief that the gifts of the plant world are planetary gifts which must be stewarded to be sustainably shared with the world. We believe that the right kinds of development can help lift the lives of native peoples and at the same time take pressure off the oldest and wildest forest regions. We believe the traditional plant wisdom has value, and that the carriers of this wisdom deserve respect and our support. We are an NGO that is also a community of explorers, a bridge between cultures. We take our name and our mission from the late Dr. Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard University, who devoted his life to exploring, learning, and sharing the teachings of the plants and the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. We are honored to use his name and to carry his work forward into the 21st century.
Michael Maki , founder of the Richard Evans Schultes Center , in the field