TORONTO, CANADA, August 13 2008: An estimated 2,500 people from across the area braved the rains last weekend to attend the Hindu Heritage Festival, held at Toronto’s Black Creek Pioneer Village by the Hindu Federation as announced on HPI on August 9.
The festival provided a perspective on how the first members of the community experienced life in Canada, said Pandit Roopnauth Sharma, president. The event is set to become an annual fixture on the community’s calendar, federation officials added.
Advocating an Unusual Role for Trees
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/science/12prof.html?ref=science
MERRICKVILLE, ONTARIO, CANADA: Dr. Diana Beresford-Kroeger, 63, is a native of Ireland who has bachelor’s degrees in medical biochemistry and botany, and has worked as a Ph.D.-level researcher at the University of Ottawa school of medicine, where she published several papers on the chemistry of artificial blood. She calls herself a renegade scientist, however, because she tries to bring together indigenous tradition and botany to advocate an unusual role for trees.
She favors what she terms a bioplan, reforesting cities and rural areas with trees according to the medicinal, environmental, nutritional, pesticidal and herbicidal properties she claims for them, which she calls ecofunctions.
Memory Elvin-Lewis, a professor of botany at Washington University, said that in India, for example, compounds from neem trees are said to have anti-inflammatory and antiviral properties and are planted around hospitals and sanitariums. “It’s not implausible,” Dr. Elvin-Lewis said; it simply hasn’t been studied.
“Her ideas are a rare, if not entirely new approach to natural history,” said Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard biologist. “The science of selecting trees for different uses around the world has not been well studied.”