Meetings for 2019-2020

Monday, October 7, 2019 7:30 p.m.

Speaker: Robert Rogers

Presentation: The Twenty Myths of Medicinal Mushrooms

The Twenty Myths of Medicinal Mushrooms explores the reality behind often-cited statements found in books, and online media.
In this presentation we will explore some of the common misconceptions associated with picking mushrooms in the wild, mycelium vs fruiting body benefits, wild vs cultivated, drug interactions (both positive and negative), and assorted other misnomers.

Robert Dale Rogers has been an herbalist for over forty-five years, and is a professional member of the American Herbalist Guild. He earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Alberta, where he is presently an assistant clinical professor in Family Medicine. He is also an adjunct professor at York University. He presently teaches plant medicine, including plant and mushroom medicine, aromatherapy and flower essences in the Earth Spirit Medicine faculty at the Northern Star College in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Robert is past chair of the Alberta Natural Health Agricultural Network and Community Health Council of Capital Health. He is a Fellow of the International College of Nutrition, past-chair of the medicinal mushroom committee of the North American Mycological Association and on the editorial boards of the International Journal of Medicinal Mushrooms, Fungi magazine and Discovery Phytomedicine. He is the author of 52 books on medicinal plants and fungi of the boreal forest, including The Fungal Pharmacy: The Complete Guide to Medicinal Mushrooms and Lichens of North America.

Monday, November 18, 2019 7:30 p.m.

Speaker: Lawrence Millman

Presentation: Fungipedia and other Tales

A presentation on adventures in ethnomycology, ecology, music and fungi history. Lawrence Millman discusses how mushrooms are much more closely related to humans than to plants, how they engage in sex, how insects farm them, and how certain species happily dine on leftover radiation, cockroach antennae, and dung. He explores the lives of individuals like African American scientist George Washington Carver, Beatrix Potter, and Gordon Wasson, Millman considers why fungi are among the most significant organisms on our planet and how they are currently being affected by destructive human behavior, including climate change.

Author-mycologist Lawrence Millman has written 17 books, including such titles as Fascinating Fungi of New England, Last Places, A Kayak Full of Ghosts, Lost in the Arctic, Giant Polypores & Stoned Reindeer, and — most recently — At the End of the World. He has done fungal inventories in places as diverse as Iceland, Honduras, Nunavik, Bermuda, Belize, Western Samoa, and Nantucket Island. In 2006, he found a polypore (Echinodontium ballouii) previously thought to be extinct. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

Updated October 30th 2019