Welcome! Conversations about Ecological Medicine

Numen: the animating force in all things living.

Numen: the Healing Power of Plants bridges worlds that aren’t often linked: spirit, ecology, and health, to show how each is essential in healing. We are creating this blog to extend the exploration initiated in the film to conversations about healthcare in our communities.

Our vision in producing Numen is to help launch a grassroots medicine movement that is as widespread and powerful as the local food movement. We hope that the film as well as discussions around topics in the film at screenings and here, on-line, can spark new conversations and debates about health and wellness and inspire real, tangible actions in communities across the country.

We’ll do this in a variety of ways that will inevitably change over time. To get started, we’ll post selections on these topics from interviews that we weren’t able to include in the film. We’ll include new interviews with individuals actively engaged in organizing and educating in their communities and beyond: herbalists creating herbal CSAs, street medics trainers, nurse practitioners, and anyone else with exciting and provocative ideas about what we need to do to design resilient, ecologically sustainable healthcare in our communities.

We’re going to follow our noses in deciding whom to include in these discussions, inviting individuals whose work we want to learn more about, people whom we believe have perspectives and experiences that add more to this exploration.

We need your help to make this material useful and interesting! Let us know who in your community is doing work we should write about. Let us know what you want to read about or share what you’ve read about you think others here might want to know about!