The Sustainable Herbs Program

09/05/2025

Filming at L’Herbier du Diois in southern France. Freshly harvested lemon balm from nearby fields.

06/25/2025

Beautiful first evening of the gathering in Oregon! Thank you Elise and Jeff Higley from for hosting! ♥️✨🙏

05/27/2025

Happy to have a chance to visit last week where they are working hard to get everything planted despite all of the rain. And super happy to have Nate Brennan as a neighbor now! Nate has been a huge part of our work at during his time and it will be wonderful now to meet and dream in person in addition to online!

01/25/2025

11/18/2024

We couldn’t go to the forest because of the rain so together with the help of Guido Mase, we great a forest together - and then we listened to what ginger and turmeric helped us see and understand about what SHI can do to help the planet - and what we can each do as well.

Then we did 3D mapping ( tools) to see where the leverage points might be. And then outlined a plan for us to work on together at .

A wonderful day to complete a remarkable week!

Such a gift to spend time with others who care as deeply about this work and who are such fun!

11/14/2024

Just a few shots from an amazing day meeting with farmers in the Doselva network. We wanted to have a more interactive participatory experience - it was remarkable how working first (albeit highly unskilled work) shifted things in such important ways.

Am not sure what exactly the magic is in these learning journeys, but there is magic here and I am so very grateful to be part of this one!!

11/13/2024

On the first morning of the Learning Journey in Nicaragua we began with reading The Bone by Mary Oliver.

And then we visited a pre- Columbia’s burial site south of Granada with the archaeologists who had excavated it to ask:

Who was here before?
Where are they now?
And what happened?

This as a way to begin listening deeply to the past in order to frame listening deeply in the present.

11/11/2024

The third SHI Learning journey has begun! We are here in Granada, Nicaragua for 6 days for a mini-deep dive into the work of Doselva, a company working in rural communities to provide markets for ginger and turmeric grown in agroforestry settings. Will also visit their processing center, the Gaia farm, archaeological sites to see experience some of the indigenous history of this place.

Tonight we arrived, shared our intentions for the week and had an amazing meal at the Gaia Forest Cafe.

11/09/2024

Final planning for the Nicaraguan Learning journey at the Gaia Forest cafe - a wonderful place if you are ever in Granada!

11/03/2024

In Nicaragua at a language school before the third SHI Learning Journey which starts next week!

18 of us will be visiting the processing center, farming communities, and farm of Doselva. This is the first SHI Learning Journey out of the country and Jefferson Shriver and the team at Doselva are doing an amazing job planning…

Wishing I had learned Spanish as a child! But grateful to have the opportunity to try now even though it sure is a lot harder to remember!

10/30/2024

There is a lot I don’t love about Supply Side West but pretty great to see this call to support the communities impacted by at this UNpA meeting - calling on member companies to generously support by sending herbal products to the region.

09/19/2024

In West Virginia and Kentucky interviewing wild harvesters and dealers about harvesting roots and herbs from Appalachia.

I love this part of my work… talking about what they do and why, what’s hard, what needs to change, and how it gets hold of them. They all do it for the money. But no one I spoke to only does it for the money.

It’s ginseng season so lots of talk about the size of roots and where they found them. Also about pricing and how it needs to change. And about yellow jackets and copperheads and rattlesnakes.

Today I sat with 5-6 diggers outside a Dairy Queen in KY. The biggest things destroying the plants, they said, aren’t harvesting. It’s clear cutting. Strip mining.

Two men talked about going back to a place where they’d planted ginseng seeds ten years ago only to find out the land wasn’t there anymore. The mountain was gone.