Author, Activist, and More!

Director, Herbalist, and all around amazing woman, Ann Armbrecht is here to talk about “The Business Of Botanicals!” It is a new week and it’s going to be a great show! Happy Monday, so, stick around! 

Ann Armbrecht

Ann Armbrecht is the director of the Sustainable Herbs Program under the auspices of the American Botanical Council. She is a Harvard-educated writer and anthropologist whose work explores the relationships between humans and the earth, most recently through her work with plants and plant medicine. She is the co-producer of the documentary Numen: The Nature of Plants and the author of the award-winning ethnographic memoir Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home, based on her research in Nepal. Her latest book is The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry (Chelsea Green Publishing, February 2021). She lives with her family in central Vermont.

The Business Of Botanicals

Ann was inspired to write her book “The Business Of Botanicals” and found herself struck by the relationship that villages had with their land in Nepal. It was more that simply “the earth is here for us,” but rather “we must give offerings to what the earth gives us.” Ann had to bring in many moving parts to make the book, but the actual work to make the book was from 2014-recently. Many of the research did not make it into the book due to it maybe being “boring” for readers, but the book itself became large scale with the larger scale stories. Nature is not ours to take, but ours to ask for. Ann Armbrecht is of grass roots, all the way from her childhood. Herbs and Botanicals are synonyms for Ann. They are simply plants, and many plants have all different qualities. Tinctures can be made from roots and a liquid, like vodka. Dried herbs vs fresh herbs all depends on how they are handled in the ground. 

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 many products that fill store shelves. In The Business of Botanicals, author Ann Armbrecht follows their journey from seed to shelf, revealing the inner workings of a complicated industry, and raises 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. 

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