Celebrating Earth Day with a Book Giveaway!

I'm offering an autographed book giveaway of **20 copies** of The Plant Hunter in celebration of Earth Day 2023!

Human health and planetary health go hand-in-hand. I think we can all agree that humans across the globe prefer to live in an environment that is free of pollution, rich in biodiversity, and with access to clean water. It is only in such an environment that we can truly thrive. I wrote about how my own life and health has been influenced by environmental exposures in my memoir, The Plant Hunter (Viking, 2021). I’ve included an excerpt from the book, which explores these connections in health:

Excerpt from The Plant Hunter, Epilogue

I’m a child of the 1970s, a casualty of poisons used during the Vietnam War. While Agent Orange was intended to strip the forest trees bare of their dense foliage to improve visibility in the jungle as men played at war, it also stripped their children’s future health away. Like me, thousands of children of US servicemen and Vietnamese villagers exposed to the potent defoliant Agent Orange were born with constellations of birth defects. Now in our forties, we share familiar health histories of missing bones, shortened limbs, and neural tube defects. While the US Veterans Health Administration included children of this era born with spina bifida in their coverage of health benefits for the children of Vietnam veterans in 1997, those like me who suffered from other life-altering bone defects were not covered. There was no assistance, no government health plan, to cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars in surgeries and prosthetic devices I’ve needed over my lifetime.

Nature’s destruction comes at a cost. If there’s anything to be learned from this pandemic or from the story of my life, it is that planetary health and human health are inextricably linked. Just as the oceans respond to the pull of the moon, nature finds a way to restore the balance of life as it is pulled to and fro. Ecosystem biodiversity is the key to the health of all life-forms. This is true whether one considers the myriad creatures that inhabit vast landmasses or even the microbes that live on and inside our bodies.

Just as bulldozers and chainsaws push their way deeper into rich forests, disrupting wildlife and creating new opportunities for disease to flourish, antibiotics, too, can disturb the balance for the humans and animals exposed to them. The dual pandemics of antibiotic-resistant infections and COVID-19 have made it plain that no one is safe if we continue on our current course. As I watch the death toll rise from COVID- 19, I never forget that antibiotic-resistant infections continue to quietly claim lives of more than seven hundred thousand people each year. In its first year, COVID-19 claimed the lives of two million people across the globe; antibiotic- resistant infections are projected to claim five times that— ten million lives per year—by 2050. How can we stand idly by as this disaster looms? No one is without risk, regardless of age, race, economic status, gender, or physical fitness. We need to prepare.

As human settlements expand with rising populations and governmental regulations are stripped away, wildlands are converted into agricultural lands, forests are felled for timber, and the ground is mined for precious metals and fossil fuels. All the while, biodiversity plummets across the United States and to the Amazon and beyond. As a result, at the very time that humankind is faced with some of the most daunting disease threats since the era of the Black Death, we are destroying the very resources that could be our salvation.

It’s a challenge, to be sure, but we are not without hope. Nature holds the secrets to healing the planet and ourselves. Across the chasm of time, language, and culture, humans have persistently observed the interspecies behaviors of other animals and have experimented with nature’s bountiful offerings. Although often relegated to the ranks of old wives’ tales by Western scientists, this rich bounty of knowledge concerning the uses of botanical ingredients as medicine is anything but. These traditional systems of medicine represent a natural pharmacy that has matured over millennia, refined and improved with each generation. While modern scientists don’t yet fully understand which plant medicines are the most effective, or how they work or which compounds are most responsible, we do know that some of our most essential pharmaceutical medicines used across the globe were initially discovered in such plants.

Like our earliest ancestors leaving the jungle, like the first men and women to build ships and set sail on the roiling ocean, we must continue our exploration. Nature is all around us; it is within us. We are nature. We must remember our place in the natural world and work with it to discover new ways for it to help us as we help it. Our fates are intertwined just like the strands of our DNA.

Nature never fails to amaze me. Its complexity, its beauty, its genius. How it finds a way to thrive and adapt, and what secrets it contains. I need look no further than my family’s little garden out back to be reminded of nature’s rich offerings and our duty to be good stewards to these plants that have so much to offer us. Nature is my home. And I know one thing for sure: I will not cease my exploration.

Book Giveaway Details

I’m giving away a free, autographed hardcover copy of The Plant Hunter (a $27 value!) to 20 new Paid Subscribers to the Nature’s Pharmacy newsletter!

Here’s how the giveaway works:

1. This offer is for folks who live in the USA. The book will be shipped via USPS media mail. To be eligible, upgrade your subscription to Paid Subscriber before midnight EST on Earth Day, April 22nd.

2. After upgrading your subscription, send an email to admin@cassandraquave.com with ‘Earth Day Book’ in the title of the message. Do not reply to this post with your personal information!

3. Include the following information in the email:

   1. First and last name

   2. Mailing address

   3. Preference for the autograph:

      1. Signed; or

      2. Signed with dedication (list the name of individual to dedicate it to)

4. The first 20 people will receive the book. If you do not receive a reply, that means the books have all been claimed or you did not include all the required information.

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If you’d like the book, but don’t want to enter the Giveaway—you can purchase it at any bookseller, or online through links provided here. Available formats include: hardcover, paperback, audio book, e-book.

Plus a reminder! All Founding Subscribers will receive a hardcover copy of the book as part of their subscription benefits 💚

Good luck and happy Earth Day! 🌎

Yours in health, Dr. Quave

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Cassandra L. Quave, Ph.D. is a scientist, author, speaker, podcast host, wife, mother, explorer, and professor at Emory University School of Medicine. She teaches college courses and leads a group of research scientists studying medicinal plants to find new life-saving drugs from nature. She hosts the Foodie Pharmacology podcast and writes the Nature’s Pharmacy newsletter to share the science behind natural medicines.