Wolf-Dieter Storl

Ethno- botanist Dr. Wolf-Dieter Storl holds academic degrees from the Ohio State University and Kent State University in Ohio. He is a magna cum laude doctorate as a Fulbright scholar from Bern, a guest lecturer for cultural ecology at the University there and a visiting scholar at the Benares Hindu University.

I would need more arms than the Hindu goddess Durga to count all the books he has written both in English and German since he took his first botany lesson at the age of nineteen. Now seventy-nine he is still very active collecting and distributing wisdom and insight.

But what really makes him my hero are not his academic accolades as awesomely impressive as they are.

What makes him my hero is that he acquired his encyclopedic  knowledge by say “NO!” to what we call progress and civilization and saying “YES” to the wild. He went out into the forest to learn a wisdom that is as old as mankind and even older, by breaking rules, defying norms and ignoring what was expected from him and considered proper behavior for an aspiring scholar. 

He went wild and he went wise and graced us with enough knowledge regarding nature and the way of the old that one can study his works for a lifetime.

I´m far from having read all his works, very far actually but I still remember what was the first thing that impressed me about Dr Storl, taken from one of his educational videos.

Sinne Ferro – when you go out into nature to collect herbs and medicinal plants, you do not come like a thief in the night. You come as the sun god, you take only what is needed and you take it without the use iron, instead using antlers – the symbol of the stag god or sun god – to collect them. And you leave n offering when you go.

And again while I have barely scratched the surface of his massive body of work that advice sums ups for me a lot of the essence of Dr. Storl – wisdom, hard work and an utmost respect for the mother that brought us all to life.

He is the wolf that gave him his first name – wild, free, inspired and wise, a leadership figure you can trust and follow, deeply connected to nature and to himself.

https://www.storl.de/english-books-by-wolf-d-storl/