Survival and Repair

Wildcrafting is ancient practice coined in a relatively young term and it has literally fed human existence since time immemorial. An early notion of wildcrafting (1924) is described as “skill in or knowledge of matters relating to survival in a wilderness environment”. Indeed, this broad skill base dates back to when most of the human population were hunters and gatherers. Much of this craft has been lost with the novelty of agriculture: “By focusing on domesticated cultivars the collective skills needed to identify and prepare wild foods has declined precipitously. Since species that contained energy and micronutrients became peripheral or were abandoned, humans sometimes have starved in the midst of ‘wild food plenty’ ”. 

We have seen this with the great potato famine when the potato blight struck the main food source for people in Ireland and throughout Europe in the 1840s. Though many people have lost their foraging skills and traditions, during times of drought and famine, survival and subsistence was (and still is for many people) a very real motivation for farmers and other rural peoples to supplement their diets with wild plants to keep themselves healthy and alive.  

Euell Gibbons, who is deemed the “father of modern wild foods,” started a resurgence of yearning for our ancient survival skills and provided inspiration for a whole generation of back-to-the-landers in the 1970s who were not taught how to use wild plant foods by elders in their families. Learning about wild foods originally from his mother and then acquiring a vast store of wild food knowledge from his curiosity about Native American uses of wild plants, it is said that Euell kept his family alive for a month on foraged puffball mushrooms, pinon nuts, and yellow prickly pears in New Mexico during the Dust-Bowl era.  

The Medicinal Plant Industry

The terms wildcrafting and wild-harvesting have come into liberal use with the blossoming medicinal plant industry.  “His skill goes back to the hunters and gatherers at the dawn of humanity, but it has been resurrected under a trendy new name: wildcrafting” (Goldberg, “From Necessity New Forest Industry Rises”). “Wildcrafting” picked up more substantial meaning in the last twenty-five years as herbal medicine has become widely popularized in the United States. In this sense, wildcrafting refers specifically to the harvesting of uncultivated, or wild, plants to be marketed as products. It has become a word for a new niche market and wild plants have become resources to be commodified and commercialized. 

Just in the last several years the Non-Timber Forest Product market has boomed 20 percent annually (Goldberg). With high demand for certain medicinal plants native to North America, such as ginseng, goldenseal, and blue cohosh, wildcrafting often became almost synonymous with the poaching of medicinal plants for their high commercial value. With a market economy as the foundation of our livelihoods, there is a tendency for commercial value to dominate over ethical and traditional values. 

While poaching is one face of wildcrafting presented to the public, it tends to discredit a long-standing tradition of plant foraging that creates positive human relationships with and sustainable subsistence from the natural world. It’s important to understand the difference between poaching and wildcrafting of wild plants. Poaching  implies disrespect for natural resources, boundaries and life forms. However, wildcrafting, when practiced conscientiously, maintains value as a craft that supports people’s livelihoods, as a valid economic pursuit with potential to strengthen and sustain local economies, as a promoter of culture, food and craft appreciation, and as a reminder of our human place in and responsibility to ecological systems.