ABOUT THIS BLOG

 

Anna (me) harvesting calendula at Herb Pharm in Oregon, Summer 2007

I’m creating this blog as an opportunity to expand upon a senior project I did for College of the Atlantic (Bar Harbor, ME) in the spring of 2008. I called it “The Ethnobotany of Wildcrafting: A Study of a Contemporary Plant Foraging Culture”.

Here is my thesis introduction:

Those who collect wild plants and mushrooms for food, medicine, craft, or ceremony are often referred to as wildcrafters. Wild plants can enrich peoples lives, for example by supplementing a grocery store diet with interesting flavors or by supplying material for baskets, weaving, or fabric dye. On another level, wild plants provide subsistence for many people around the globe; their livelihoods are dependent on wild plants as sources of income, nutrition and healthcare.  

Here in the United States, a very marginal group of people actually make a living from wild plants. In this mature capitalist society, most people are employed through either skilled or unskilled wage labor, and of the 285 million people living in the United States, only less than one percent of people in our country are farmers (United States Environmental Protection Agency “Ag 101″). The even tinier fraction of people whose income is supported by wild plants include maple “syrupers”, tree-tippers (those who make holiday wreaths from the branches of evergreens), “mushroomers”, seaweed harvesters, wildflower bouquet-makers, ash bark basket makers, birch bark canoe makers, harvesters who provide specialty items for restaurants and stores (like fiddleheads and ramps), medicinal plant harvesters, and herbalists. 

About twenty-five years ago, as herbal supplements started to become widely popularized, the medicinal plant industry began to take off. Though more and more herbs are being cultivated, wildcrafters provide the bulk of raw materials to be processed. Now the market demand for medicinal wild plants is greater than ever. After I completed internships with two different herbal companies, Red Moon Herbs in North Carolina and Herb Pharm in Oregon, my curiosity was piqued about the medicinal plant industry and the wildcrafters who work behind the scenes. These questions came to mind:

Why do people entrust their livelihoods to wild plants?

How do foraging traditions inform this craft today? 

What kinds of personal ethics guide wildcrafters?

The main purpose of this blog is to open up a project that has been composed of my own thoughts in my own head to an audience of wildcrafters and those just starting to familiarize themselves with the concept of wild harvesting. This audience is encouraged to participate by sharing ideas, questions and in discussion. If you would like to know more about the mechanics of the project I did last spring, please make comments on my posts and/or email me.