Mark Plotkin

Mark Plotkin with Waura Chief

Mark J. Plotkin (May 21, 1955 –) is an ethnobotanist and a plant explorer in the Neotropics, where he is an expert on rainforest ecosystems. Plotkin is an advocate for tropical rainforest conservation.

Background and career

After attending Isidore Newman School in New Orleans, Plotkin was a college dropout working at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology when he joined an expedition searching for an elusive crocodilian species in 1978 and was galvanized into returning to education. He completed his bachelor's degree at the Harvard University, his master's degree in forestry at Yale University and his Ph.D. at Tufts University, during which he completed a handbook for the Tirio people of Suriname detailing their own medicinal plants—the only other book printed in Tirio language being the Bible. He went on to do research at Harvard under Richard Evans Schultes. He is the author of the book Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice. Other critically acclaimed books by Plotkin include Medicine Quest, The Killers Within - The Deadly Rise of Drug-Resistant Bacteria (with Michael Shnayerson), and The Shaman's Apprentice, (a children's book with Lynne Cherry).

In 1995, Plotkin and prominent Costa Rican conservationist Liliana Madrigal formed the Amazon Conservation Team^[1] to protect Amazonian rainforest in partnership with local indigenous peoples. ACT has now worked with 32 tribes throughout Amazonia. Plotkin continues to work with the Tirio of Suriname, and in Brazil as well. He is featured in the 1997 IMAX film Amazon.

Plotkin received the San Diego Zoo Gold Medal for Conservation (1993) and the Roy Chapman Andrews Distinguished Explorer Award (2004). Time magazine called him an "Environmental Hero for the Planet" (2001) and Smithsonian magazine hailed him as one of "35 Who Made a Difference" (2005), along with other notables like Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, and fellow New Orleanian Wynton Marsalis.

In March 2008, Plotkin and Madrigal were among those chosen as "Social Entrepreneurs of the Year" by the Skoll Foundation.^[2]

In May 2010, Mark Plotkin received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. The degree citation read in part: "For teaching us that the loss of knowledge and species anywhere impoverishes us all; for combining humanitarian vision with academic rigor and moral sensibility; and for reminding us always, with clarity and passion and humor, that when we study people and plants, we are simultaneously exploring paths to philosophy, music, art, dance reverence, and healing; Lewis and Clark is honored to confer on you today the Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa." In October of the same year, the great primatologist Jane Goodall presented Mark with an award for "International Conservation Leadership."

Books

Books written by Mark J. Plotkin include: Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice and Medicine Quest.

Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice

Tales of a Shaman's Apprentice is the account of Plotkin's work in the Amazon rainforest tracking shamans' knowledge of curative powers of plants. The book details the potential value of these plants as well as the incredible wisdom of indigenous healers as to how these species can best be used.

The book served as the basis for the award-winning documentary The Shaman's Apprentice, directed by Miranda Smith.

Medicine Quest

In Medicine Quest, Plotkin continues to address topics discussed in his previous book, exploring searches for new medicine from nature around the world. The book, writes Plotkin, "is a quest powered by the desperation of the ill and the compassion of those who would cure them."

In this book, Plotkin highlights the ironic marriage of natural products, indigenous wisdom, and biotechnology and details discoveries already producing leads in the laboratory: painkillers from the skin of rain forest frogs, anticoagulants from leech saliva, and antitumor agents from snake venom. Medicine Quest provides also background on the centuries-old pursuit of cures that ranges from the ancient Egyptians expeditions to foreign lands in search of healing plants, to the nineteenth-century development of aspirin; from willow bark, to the extraction of penicillin from fungi.

Notes

1. ^ "Amazon Conservation Team". http://www.amazonteam.org/. Retrieved 2009-07-05. 
2. ^ "Recipients of Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship (A-E)". http://www.skollfoundation.org/grantees/a-e.asp. Retrieved 2009-07-05. ^{[dead link]}

References

• "35 who made a difference", Smithsonian Magazine, November 2005, 38–39, Vol 36 number 07

External links

• Mark Plotkin interview: Indigenous people are key to rainforest conservation efforts

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Name	Plotkin, Mark
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Date of birth	1955-05-21
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