GoWild - In the News
The Mighty Oak:
Live Video from the Center for Spiritual Living
Jolie’s talk on The Mighty Oak at the Center for Spiritual Living in Redding, California on September 27th, 2020 was recorded through Facebook Live.
View the video on our blog.
An Oak Love Story with Jolie Elan
In these times of great change, we must act from a place of connection to all nature. It is by rooting into the intelligence of nature we receive guidance and medicine for our times. In this teleseminar, Jolie Elan shares her experience of tapping into the wisdom of the oaks for guidance in hard times.
Many Indigenous people say that plants reveal their medicine via dreams and visions. What if these types of relationships are within everyone’s reach? How do we go about building mutually beneficial relationships? On a decade long adventure to eat acorn food, ethnobotanist Jolie Elan became so intertwined within the oak web of life that the oaks began to reveal myths and medicines in dreams and visions. Join Ethnobotanist and oak lover Jolie Elan as she tells her ethnobotanical love story that discusses the ecology, botany, medicine, myth, spirit, and food of the mighty oak.
Listen to the interview at natureevolutionaries.com
Working with Bio-Intelligence of Plants for Healing and Guidance During Insane Times
SEPTEMBER 2019
How can conscious engagement with plants, with which we’ve co-evolved since the dawn of our species, support healing in the physical, emotional and spiritual realms and help mend our separation from nature? Three brilliant herbalists/botanists, long on the cutting-edge of re-empowering the plant-human bond, share their insights. Hosted by Kathleen Harrison, plant person extraordinaire, President of Botanical Dimensions. With: Pam Montgomery, world-renowned herbalist, educator, spiritual ecologist, founder of the Organization of Nature Evolutionaries (O.N.E.), organizer of the Green Nations Gathering, author of Plant Spirit Healingand Partner Earth; Jolie Elan; founding Director of Go Wild Institute, deep ecologist, ethnobotanist, and global educator; Kami McBride, author of The Herbal Kitchen, with 25 years’ teaching experience, longtime leader of the beloved Earth Connection herb walks at Bioneers. To listen to the talks or read the trancript click here
Are Plants Intelligent?
DECEMBER 2018
– A Radio Interview on Holistic Health Perspectives
Plant Healer Interview With Jolie Elan
OCTOBER 15, 2018
We live in very interesting times and I am sure your readers will agree that much of our society has lost its way. When we live from within the ethos of nature it can help us find the inspiration and wisdom we need to move through this Great Turning/ Great Unraveling and find our rightful place in within the web of life. Nature knows how to live in balance, when we tune in profoundly, we see viscerally how we are nature and a gigantic healing takes place, for us individually, societally and also for the Earth. In my worldview Nature does the real healing. Removing folk medicine from the experience of the land could work at counter purposes to deep healing of our society and the Earth. READ THE PDF
Marin Independent Journal – Take A Walk On The Wild Side, With Wildflowers
MARCH 31, 2015
Jolie Egert Elan wants Marin residents to consider learning about the world of native edible or medicinal plants in a novel way.
Get to know them in the same way you’d approach going to a big party, Elan says. “At first, you don’t know anyone. Then you meet a couple of people and maybe you can recognize their faces in a crowd. Next, you remember their names.”
It may take a few more introductions before you begin to know their stories and to whom they’re related.
“After some time, there is no way that you would mistake that person for another and that’s how it is with plants,” she says. “It takes time to know the plants around you and positively identify them.” READ THE ARTICLE
Planting Ideas – A Mill Valley Library First Friday Event
APRIL 10, 2014
In the modern era, literature and science have generally been seen as separate if not opposite. As it turns out, art and science have more in common than not. In concert with the launch of SeedSmart, the Mill Valley Public Library’s Seed Lending Library, we present a lively and multifaceted conversation with poet Amy Glynn, ethnobotanist Jolie Lonner Egert, watershed consultant Apryl Uncapher, and seed company co-founder N. Astrid Hoffman.
Click here for the video of this presentation
“Why Flowers Excite Me”
An Interview With Jolie Egert On Holistic Health Perspectives
NOVEMBER 25, 2013
The ever wonderful Jolie Lonner Egert talking about the study of Botany and why it is so exciting….
Sierra – On The One Hand…Acorns
MAY 1, 2013
On the One Hand
Acorns, a diet staple of California’s Native Americans for centuries, have lost their gastronomical cachet, except among bears and squirrels. But the nuts may be poised for a culinary comeback. Ethnobotanist Jolie Lonner Egert of Go Wild Consulting suggests acorns as the perfect gluten-free eco-food. “Acorns are abundant, delicious, and nutritious,” she says. A 1986 study of acorns’ agricultural promise found them to be packed with vitamins, minerals, and protein while requiring little cultivation. Their oil is similar to olive oil, and some of the world’s 500 varieties even have notes of chocolate and cashew. “People have acorns in their yard,” Egert says. “Instead of dumping them, eat them.”
On the Other Hand
But will acorns even be around much longer? Around 1995, the previously unknown water mold Phytophthora ramorum—a relative of the pathogen that caused the potato famine in 19th-century Ireland—was observed infecting oak trees in Mill Valley, California. Since then, sudden oak death has spread to 14 counties in California and 1 in Oregon, killing more than a million trees. While the pathogen probably arrived via ornamental nursery plants from Asia, it now likely spreads through wind, rain, and human footsteps. Foresters fear that California could eventually lose 90 percent of its live oaks and tan oaks, keystone species that provide habitat for hundreds of varieties of native creatures. — Dashka Slater
San Francisco Chronicle – Acorns Make Surprising Dishes
APRIL 29, 2013
The journey – a pursuit of acorn understanding – starts on a cliff in Big Sur, wends all the way to a hot dog stand by the train tracks in Martinez, and climbs into the redwoods above Oakland.
It’s a trip that has history and myth, identity and environmentalism, fine dining and simple sustenance, and one that travels to the heart of what can be called California’s earliest cuisine.
The bread that inspired the trek was a revelation in a 12-course Taste of Big Sur meal at Sierra Mar restaurant in the Post Ranch Inn, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.
Earth Island Journal – This Thanksgiving Consider Cooking With Acorn Flour
NOVEMBER 21, 2012
Acorn kernels provide a complete vegetable protein and they are full of minerals and vitamins that are absent in refined wheat
Thanksgiving is one time of the year when most Americans eat seasonal native foods. Or at least the squash, pumpkin, corn, turkey and cranberries were all native and seasonal in Massachusetts where the Pilgrims celebrated their first successful harvest in the New World in 1621. What’s rarely mentioned is that Pilgrims also had acorns on the menu, likely in the form of bread made from acorn flour.
READ MORE about cooking with Acorn Flour
Napa Register Article – Students Discover Nature’s Bounty Growing Along River
NOVEMBER 12, 2012
YOUNTVILLE — To the knowing eye, a barren patch of nature can become a cornucopia of nature’s bounty.
More than two dozen students from Vintage High School trod through a nature preserve along the Napa River, amid trees and shrubs brimming with usually unnoticed acorns, nuts and blossoms. Leading them to the riverbank were their guides for the afternoon, an ecologist and botanist who called constant attention to the hidden treasure at their feet or behind their heads.
“I hope they can just experience our natural ecosystem and learn to appreciate the diversity that oak woodlands support, that you can find along Napa River even to this day,” said Shari Gardner, an ecologist for Friends of the Napa River who led the students on their Thursday visit to the Napa River Ecological Reserve.
Jweekly.Com Article – Jolie Acornseed: Educator Plants Kernels Of Jewish Wisdom
SEPTEMBER 28, 2011
Jolie Egert is a plant whisperer.
A Jewish plant whisperer.
She’s also a bit of an evangelist — for acorns. The Fairfax-based educator, botanist and herbalist is such an enthusiastic proponent of the ancient nuts, in fact, she is known to don squirrel puppets and a felt acorn hat while giving presentations about them.
“I eat a lot of acorns, and early Jews ate acorns too,” Egert says. “Before we were an agricultural society, acorns were a staple of the diet near the Fertile Crescent.”
And, she points out, “You can make most baked goods using acorn flour. Muffins, cake — even challah.”
SFGate.Com Article – Acorns: Not Just For Squirrels Anymore
SEPTEMBER 28, 2011
It’s acorn season. They’re falling by the barrel-load into our yards and parks, littering the ground with squirrel food. But Jolie Lonner Egert doesn’t see this as a nuisance… Read the article here.
Acorns–Not just for squirrels anymore – SFGate
Bringing Back the Oak Ceremonies
January 14, 2015
Somewhere near the top of Mount Tamalpais, in a shady grove of tanoak trees, masked people gather in a circle. Fox. Woodpecker. Moth. Silk flags dance high above their heads, their bright colors flashing against the dark canopy. In the center is an altar of candles, stones, acorns, and oak leaves.
Smiling children raise their voices in a simple song: “Thank you to the oaks, you’re beautiful and we love you!” The children shake their handmade rattles to the beat, the surrounding oak trees tremble their leaves in response, acorns drop at their feet. Silence.
Oak Moth flitters to the center of the circle and speaks: “We gladly give our lives to sustain others. We want to know: what will you die for?” Opossum takes the floor: “There are too many people. And they have too much stuff. There’s not enough room for us anymore.” The pathogen for Sudden Oak Death waves her green arms wildly: “We love the oak trees to death and if you don’t love them more than we do, then we will take them down!” The circle responds: “We hear you.”
READ MORE about Bringing Back Oak Ceremonies