Following the Herbal Harvest: A Search for the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines - Ann Armbrecht

From tulsi to turmeric, echinacea to elderberry, medicinal herbs are big business--but do they deliver on their healing promise to those who consume them, those who provide them, and to the natural world? \n \nAn eye-opener. . . . [Armbrecht] challenges ideas of what medicine can be and how business practices can corrupt, and expand, our notions of plant-based healing.--The Boston Globe \n \n[This] is one of the most important and readable books on the subject of herbs available today. Ann's story of her journey and the amazing message her book conveys moved me to tears. . . . Thank you, Ann, for listening to the plants as deeply as you have, for pointing the way forward, and for having the courage to lead us there.--Rosemary Gladstar, author of Rosemary Gladstar's Medicinal Herbs Using herbal medicines to heal the body is an ancient practice, but in the twenty-first century, it is also a worldwide industry. Yet most consumers know very little about where those herbs come from and how they are processed into the hundreds of products that fill store shelves. In Following the Herbal Harvest (originally published in hardcover as The Business of Botanicals), author Ann Armbrecht embarks on a journey to follow herbal medicines from source to shelf. Her travels in North America, Europe, and India reveal the inner workings of the botanicals industry as she confronts complex questions about the ethical and ecological issues of mass production of medicines derived from these healing plants, many of which are imperiled in the wild. This is the first book to explore the interconnected web of the global herb industry and an invaluable resource for conscious consumers who want to better understand the social and environmental impacts of the products they buy. Inspired by her travels, Ann founded the Sustainable Herbs Initiative (SHI), which is devoted to motivating change in the herbal products industry. In a new epilogue for the paperback edition, the author describes how SHI's Learning Lab and Learning Journeys are bringing together stakeholders from herbal product companies to explore how they might collaboratively work to address the problems of poverty, biodiversity loss, and the climate crisis. Because, as Ann writes, Herbal medicine is about creating wellness, resilience. It is about wholeness. From that, a huge industry has developed . . . an industry that I discovered too often ignores the social, environmental, economic and spiritual causes of diseas