The Business of Botanicals Quotes

“I came to realize that the point was not to arrive at a place where I could make definitive statements about what is or isn’t sustainable. It was about learning how to live in the presence of a world we did not make. Like the plants, the world is alive, and the task first is to meet that aliveness. That realization, in turn, helped me listen more deeply.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“Stand beneath the moon in silence. Know you are part of something so mysterious and holy that if you can give your attention to that holiness, it will teach you every moment that you need to do.

To give our attention to holiness.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“Constant busyness because of a busy mind prevents us from dropping into being. It isn’t about not doing, he clarified. It is about the place from which we do.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“Both concepts—the honorable harvest, the honorable merchant—are about limits on action, limits on what we take—based on honor. These limits arise from the interaction between a person and a place, or between two people, and they are guided by honor, not by rules. The word honor holds a quality of uprightness, brining our best self forward, a quality I associate with satwa. I also associate it with the shamans in Hedangna and their ability to see double. It is necessary also to see the context—the other species that live in a meadow or forest, or the person to whom you give your world. That context, in a way, creates a structure for the practices or reciprocity. These examples are specific to a particular cultural framework, but they reflect qualities that most people bring to the activities and relationships they care about.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“But,” he added, “the seeds are now in place. Who knows what the long-term impacts of those seeds might be? This is how people become empowered. It is invaluable in the long term.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“Conscious capitalism falls short when we rely on it as the only step needed, rather than as a first step along the much longer and more challenging journey of addressing the social and ecological consequences of our ways of living.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“So now people are learning to live without contact with the earth or the sky. They are constructing multistory apartment buildings thirty to forty stories high and living inside. They aren’t touching the soil. They aren’t seeing the sky. No wonder they are getting diseases.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“It seems reasonable to expect companies to reveal the sources of the raw materials in the products they well as the impacts that our purchases have on the communities that grow and collect those raw materials. But it also seems reasonable that consumers should not rush to judgement or have unrealistically high expectations if they are unwilling to learn about and accept the real complexities of sourcing botanicals.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“If we consumers could instead see ourselves as partners with herbal product companies—working together to solve really tough problems—could that deeper level of engagement offer some of the very healing we seek to experience by using herbal medicines? And in turn, what if companies treat the buyers of their products as citizens of a shared world, not simply as consumers to whom they hope to sell another product? Such a shift requires a significant, even radical, level of engagement and trust between consumers and business. It requires understanding that buying may be one way to bring about change, but it will never be enough to expect buying to be the only engagement necessary to being about change. It is not an admonishment not to buy. It is a charge to take responsibility to learn and understand the ways our purchases do and do not make a difference. And not stopping there.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“Rather than only focusing on improving the constituents in a crop or even more broadly improving the quality of the field, they start with the belief that the field is only as healthy as the overall community within which the farm is located.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“In our complex dealing with the physical world, we find it very difficult to recognize all the products of our activities,” literary theorist Raymond Williams wrote in The Country and the City. “We recognize some of the products, and call others by-products; but the slag heap is as real a product as the coal, just as the river stinking with sewage and detergent is as much our product as the reservoir.” Side effects of medicine aren’t side effects, pediatric neurologist Dr. Martha Herbert told us when we interviewed her for Numen. They are just not the effects we want, but that makes them no less important or worthy of our concern. Seeing those effects is simply another way of seeing double.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“What twist of perception allows us to believe that, in poisoning the world, we are not also poisoning ourselves, poisoning the people and places we love?”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“In fact, Tickell pointed out, some pesticides contain chemicals originally created to kill humans. Tickell gives the example of IG Farben, the chemical company that produced the chemical weapons used in warfare and at Auschwitz (and owner of the patents for, among other products, Bayer Aspirin). After the war IG Farben repurposed its deadliest chemicals, “right down to the use of Zyklon B—the deadly gas used to kill at least one million Jews,” as an insecticide on American farm fields. This bears repeating. The chemicals used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz have been repurposed to spray on fields where food is grown.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“We are all here” Jeff said, gesturing across the landscape. The web of life in the field vibrates with aliveness, and that is the essence of viriditas. It isn’t magic. It is simply paying attention.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“Was it possible to taste or sense the medicine of a place? I wondered. What would it take to be able to do so? The priests and shamans in Hedangna also have the ability to see charawa, which is an essence in grain imbued by the ancestors that makes the grain last much longer than the physical substance otherwise should. Charawa echoes what Lizzie describes as the medicine of place, that unseen web that when enlivened through prayer translates into the material world. Like the laral value of an object, this unseen quality is strengthened by the offerings we make, offerings expressed in our care and attention. This first requires that we deem this web of relationships, from mycorrhizal networks to Hildegard’s viriditas, worthy and recognize that it needs our care. Not seeing this invisible dimension, the priests and shamans say, makes humans selfish. Because we cannot see this web of reciprocity on which our life depends, we do not understand our role in that web and our responsibility for the part we play. As Jeff said, we begin to believe we are in charge.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“Based on that traditional knowledge,” he explained when we spoke on the phone , “these herbs work as they do because they grew in specific areas. If we grow the plants in a different area, the plants will be different. It doesn’t mean they will be better or worse, just different.” The constituents in plants can vary even when they’re growing in the same general locale because of differences in microclimate, such as whether they’re growing on the north side of a hill or the south side.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“There are always corners to cut. They are easier to cut when we don’t know who’s lives our shortcuts will impact, or if those impacts are far from our home.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“The laral value of an object is the quality that arises from being in relationship with the world behind the object. It is a quality felt but not seen, a value, Harrison said, we can “live by.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“What we see depends on history and culture as much as it does on the structure of our eyes, he wrote. Contemporary humans are less and less able to see the plentitude of the world. “Nothing is less cultivated these days in Western societies than the art of seeing.” Seeing what is takes time, he wrote; it requires a kind of depth perception that is no longer characteristic of this age. The promise of herbal medicine is that it offers products that bring wellness not only to each of us, but also to humanity and the earth. But that is only the case if individuals and companies are truly committed to wellness each step of the journey, not just in the finished product on the shelf. Laral value captures this fuller meaning of tending the whole.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“The quality of our attention to the whole is only as effective as our capacity to pay attention. And there are limits on how much any one person can pay attention, which means that everyone’s attention matters. The question then becomes: What conditions allow people to pay attention?”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“Plant medicines “fell away not because they had been shown to be ineffective,” Steven Dentali wrote in a 2010 journal article. “They just fell out of fashion.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry

“By seeing how our lives depend on a web of non-visible relationships, we enter a relationship with that broader frame, or web. We see ourselves as part of the unfolding of events and act accordingly.”
― Ann Armbrecht, The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry