Event

Café Scientifique 3-17

March topic: Hemp's Return to Humanity, presented by Doug Fine and George Weiblen

Is hemp the game-changing plant that's going to feed the world and free us from fossil fuels while putting small farmers back to work? With its super strong fibers, nutritious seed oil and vast, untapped potential as an alternative energy source, "Hemp Bound" writer Doug Fine thinks so. Hemp's one downside? For nearly a century, it's been effectively illegal to grow industrial cannabis in the United States even though Betsy Ross wove the nation's first flag out of hemp fabric, Thomas Jefferson composed the Declaration of Independence on it, and colonists could pay their taxes with it. But as the prohibition on hemp's psychoactive cousin winds down, one of humanity's longest-utilized plants is about to be reincorporated into the American economy.

Doug Fine has written for the Washington Post, Salon, U.S. News and World Report, Wired, Outside, National Public Radio and others. He has traveled to Burma, Rwanda, Laos, Guatemala and Tajikistan. His book, "Too High To Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution" examines America's 40-year-old war on drugs from both an economic and sustainability standpoint. In 2014 he published "Hemp Bound," which has been called "a blueprint for the future of America."

Professor and Bell Museum herbarium curator George Weiblen received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1999. The Weiblen lab at the University of Minnesota studies plant and insect systematics, molecular phylogenetics, popular genetics, ecology and coevolution. He's interested in Cannabis genetics, and is a follow of the Institute on the Environment, an institute that seeks solutions to Earth's most pressing environmental problems.