Dr. Balick is 2018 recipient of Fairchild Medal

Dr. Michael J. Balick

Dr. Michael J. Balick, Vice President for Botanical Science and Philecology Curator at the Institute for Economic Botany, The New York Botanical Garden (NYBG), has been named the 2018 recipient of the David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. In an announcement from its headquarters in Hawaii, the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) recognized Dr. Balick for a career spanning over four decades of botanical fieldwork and research around the globe.

The Fairchild Medal will be presented to Dr. Balick at a black-tie dinner at NTBG’s historical garden and former residence of David Fairchild The Kampong in Coconut Grove, Florida on January 26. The following day Dr. Balick will give a public lecture entitled “Plants, People, and Culture: Exploring the Roots of Wisdom.”

Like the Fairchild Medal’s namesake, Dr. Balick has many decades of experience conducting botanical fieldwork and exploration in regions as diverse as Central and South America, the Caribbean, South Asia, and the Middle East. Much of Dr. Balick’s work since 1998 has focused on understanding the diversity, distribution, and uses of plants in tropical Pacific Islands, including The Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, and most recently Vanuatu.

As a high school student he was inspired by Fairchild’s seminal 1938 book The World Was My Garden. “After reading that book, I was hooked — this was to be the field for me,” Dr. Balick recalled.

Upon being accepted to Harvard University, Dr. Balick was inspired by the famed plant explorer Richard Evans Schultes who sent him on his first field collecting trip to the Amazon in 1976. Following his introduction to tropical botany and indigenous peoples, Dr. Balick continued to study under Schultes, graduating from Harvard in 1980 with a Ph.D. in biology and specialty in ethnobotany and business administration.

Dr. Wade Davis, Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia commented, “No one could be more deserving of this award than Mike Balick. In so many ways he is, as both an ethnobotanist and an economic botanist, the true inheritor of the legacy of both David Fairchild and his own mentor, Richard Evans Schultes.”

NTBG’s President and CEO Chipper Wichman called Dr. Balick an “outstanding choice” for the Fairchild Medal. “Over the past four decades Mike has been at the cutting edge of what we now call ‘biocultural conservation’ — the conservation of both the natural world and the indigenous cultures that have evolved with it,” Wichman said, adding: “As an economic botanist, Mike exemplifies Fairchild’s desire to enrich human society by traveling to far-away places to search for new plants and cultural knowledge.”

Contact Arlene Lang for ticket info: alang@ntbg.org or 305-442-7169 Ext. 103

=== 
The Arbor - A boutique eco-living community in Coconut Grove. Check it out.
===