Transforming the study of plants and people: A reflection on 35 years of The New York Botanical Garden Institute of Economic Botany

Abstract

The creation of the NYBG Institute of Economic Botany (IEB) was intended to help revitalize the field of economic botany and ethnobotany, through the work of a multidisciplinary staff who would study important issues of great human concern. Early staff appointments included anthropologists and ecologists, who utilized perspectives from the social and natural sciences that, when combined with NYBG staff trained in systematic botany, economic botany and ethnobotany, have been effective in changing research approaches to the study of the relationships between plants, people and culture. IEB staff activities include research projects, teaching in graduate and undergraduate programs, mentoring students, publishing the results of scientific research and outreach to the public as well as communities in areas where its programs operate. Thirty-five years after the creation of the IEB, the fields of economic botany and ethnobotany have greater preeminence as scientific disciplines and classes in these topics have grown from only a handful at universities in the 1980s to over 70 today. Several dozen graduates of the IEB’s Ph.D. programs now teach or carry out research at many major institutions around the world, as well as in the private sector; it is this next generation who will continue and expand studies of this field.