Stephen Harrod Buhner - About | Stephen Harrod Buhner

These kinds of bios are troublesome. Over the past 40 years I have explored many biographical forms to describe myself and have never been satisfied, in part I think because I have a natural tendency against publicly applauding my accomplishments. And perhaps it is the root of that tendency that whenever I do list what I have accomplished, it always seems inadequate to what I could have done had I been clearer or more mature or possessed fewer limitations or started younger or contemplated more deeply. Or perhaps that is just the way all of us are deep down inside in the place no one else ever sees.

The struggle is always psychological and I genuinely don’t know how to tell you what I have accomplished over the past half century of my life in any way that the part of me that likes ice cream finds enjoyable. Nevertheless . . . here is one way of looking at who I am — though of course it won’t tell you anything about why I find William Stafford’s poem “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” so deeply moving.

I am an interdisciplinary, independent scholar, polymath, autodidact, Fellow of Schumacher College UK and have been head researcher for the Foundation for Gaian Studies for the past thirty years (gaianstudies.org).

Polymath means a person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning which does describe me so far as I can tell (though when I look at Leonardo Da Vinci's life I am not so sure). I read continually, across a very wide range, and began to do so when I was young, some 30,000 books so far, 50,000 or so scientific journal articles, and hundreds of thousands of articles in magazines, newspapers, and online. I do so not only for entertainment or to educate myself but also to cross-correlate insights from multiple and widely divergent fields into usable knowledge that can address some of the problems we face as a species, in particular those that call me to them most strongly (since I can’t, as no one can, effectively address all of them).

I have achieved some degree of mastery in a number of fields such as bacterial ecology, intelligence, and resistance dynamics; plant intelligence, ecology, and medicinal sophistications; several forms of psychotherapy; human psychology; biological self-organization; nonlinearity; the dynamics of Gaian nonlinearity and self-organization; contemplative spirituality (primarily contemplative animism); transcultural epistemology; fine woodworking and the restoration/remodeling of old houses as individual art forms; sophistication in the writing of nonfiction; lectures as performance art; and I am quite sure a number of others which are not occurring to me now.

I have written 23 books, scores of magazine articles, and numerous memoir and fictional short stories and poems. There are perhaps a million of my books in print, foreign rights have been sold in 20 countries, and a number of my books have won awards, the most gratifying being a Nautilus and BBC environmental book of the year award for The Lost Language of Plants. In 2022 I received the first annual McKenna Academy Distinguished Natural Philosopher Award in recognition of my work.

I come from a long line of healers including a president of the Kentucky Medical Association and Surgeon General of the United States. The most important to me, however, are Elizabeth Lusterheide, a midwife and herbalist who began practice in southern Indiana in the early 1800s and my great-grandfather C.G. Harrod who inspired me to become the kind of healer that American medicine no longer has a place for.

Some of the contributions I have made during my working life are:

Initiated the recovery of ancient and herbal brewing traditions with the publication of my book on the topic which led to the gruit renaissance, particularly in France, and the emergence of unique historical ales and beers made by such companies as Dogfish Brewery.
Developed the first comprehensive analysis of what Borrelia bacteria (Lyme disease) do in the body by reading, analyzing, and cross-correlating every peer review journal on the topic so that physicians, herbalists, and the infected could knowledgeably treat/deal-with the condition.
Developed the first coherent treatment protocols for the Lyme-group of chronic, stealth infections, variations of which have treated some one hundred thousand people, at minimum, the past 15 years.
Brought to prominence two previously undiscovered (by Americans) herbal medicines: Polygonum cuspidatum (Japanese knotweed root) for treatment of Lyme infections and its use as a systemic anti-inflammatory, and pine pollen which contains testosterone that when used as a tincture directly raises free testosterone levels in the blood.
Brought the concept of direct (rather than indirect) androgenic plants to the field of American herbal medicine, in other words, plants that contain testosterone and other androgens.
Developed the first comprehensive knowledge base and subsequent text on potent, systemic antibacterial plants which are effective in the treatment of resistant infections that do not respond to pharmaceuticals.
Developed the first comprehensive text on herbal antivirals in American herbalism.
Wrote the first comprehensive analyses of the non-rational, non-trial-and-error methods for gaining understanding the medicinal uses of plants by members of indigenous cultures, then expanded that to European herbalism, and then worldwide, cross-correlating it to determine the commonalities involved.
Wrote the first comprehensive text examining the impact of the thousands of tons of pharmaceuticals that have been released into the environment on Earth ecological functioning and its life forms.
Developed the most complex understanding (at the present time) of the sophistication and synergy of herbal medicines in the treatment of chronic diseases and their capacity for subtle modulation of human physiology during such disease conditions.
Developed the first comprehensive understanding at the purpose of naturally occurring hallucinogenic plants in ecosystem function.
Began publishing an ongoing series of books that for the first time developed a sophisticated theoretical foundation for contemplative animism.

I am and always have been interested in the invisibles of life, those meanings and communications that touch us from the heart of Earth and let us know that we are surrounded by more intelligence, mystery, and caring than our American culture admits of; how to reinhabit our interbeing with the world; how to sit in the council of all life as kin rather than dominators; and how to live sustainably on this Earth that I love more than I know how to say.

Most of all though, I have spent the last half century doing my best to learn how to be a human being, the hardest thing of all, I have realized, to learn.