Sbear, 77

Herbal Environmentalist Imagine walking a pleasant nature path and coming upon a pretty wild plant that you don't know. So what is it? How would you find out? Is it edible or poisonous?

Now imagine whipping out your smartphone ap or laptop program to enter the visible characteristics that you can see (in pictures & plain language) and up pops some of the possibilities that you can narrow down. Wouldn't that be great!? Join me with your botanical or database know-how to help bring this into reality for people to become more familiar with nature. I find the garden everywhere - what expanse of concrete doesn't have plants growing through the cracks? There is no shortage of farmers in this world. I focus on familiarizing with the wild plants.

Growing up in big NYC and during the Vietnam fiasco drove me to a passionate interest in nature leading to herbs and phytochemisty. Starting school as a poor freshman at 40 and ending up a decade later with a PhD and a good job at NIH, I now understand herbs at a molecular level and continue to follow the literature on the internet. I hope for a web database resource can help people feel closer to the earth, themselves and each other and to poison the environment less. My life has been normal enough to cope with modern society yet unusual enough to think out of the box a lot.

I don't expect you to make me happy… I am already. Aside from humor to share, I desire your perspective to add to mine. Feelings for starters; no matter what, we always have feelings to share. And the doubts. And let's not forget the dreams, both the big visions of where our lives are going as well as the strange ones that we wake up with. Then there's always a dash of politics and attitude like seasoning in the conversational stew. Other topics may range through environment, diet, travel, ancient cultures, investments, social justice. Let's continue this revealing discussion by you sending me a greeting with something about what you do to improve the worl