Michael J. Balick, Ph.D., Vice President and Director of The New York Botanical Garden's Institute of Economic Botany, was this year's recipient of the Natural Products Association's Rachel Carson Environmental Award. This award was created to recognize individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the environmental community.

In presenting Dr. Balick the award at their national annual convention on July 20-22, 2007, the Natural Products Association cited the breadth of his accomplishments in the field of ethnobotany. Of particular interest was his extensive work involving ethnopharmacological studies—the search for plants with medicinal properties—particularly his fieldwork in Belize that lead to the formation of the world's first ethno-biomedical forest reserve. Together with Drs. Rosita Arvigo and Gregory Shropshire, he co-founded the Ix Chel Tropical Research Foundation, a center in Belize devoted to traditional healing and cultural preservation. From 1986-1996 he helped lead a collaboration between The New York Botanical Garden and the US National Cancer Institute to survey Central and South America and the Caribbean for plants with potential applications against cancer and AIDS.

Since the mid 1970's, Dr. Balick has studied the relationship between plants and people, working with traditional cultures in tropical, subtropical, and desert environments. He specializes in ethnobotany, working with indigenous cultures to document their plant knowledge, understand the environmental effects of their traditional management systems, and develop sustainable utilization systems—while ensuring that the benefits of such work are always shared with local communities. Dr. Balick is an expert on useful and toxic plants, as well as the palm family, an economically important family of plants in the tropics. In 1981 he co-founded The New York Botanical Garden's Institute of Economic Botany with Sir Ghillean Prance. The largest and most active program of its kind in the nation, the Institute is devoted to furthering knowledge of the relationship between plants and people. As part of his work, Dr. Balick has established numerous collaborations between communities, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and institutions in the United States and Europe all working towards the common theme of discovering plants with potential therapeutic uses.