by Josef Brinckmann
HerbalGram. 2019; American Botanical Council

This opinion piece is based partly on direct observations from fieldwork over the decades with communities in rural and remote areas who depend on wild collection and farming of medicinal plants for some or all of their household income. Flowering, fruiting, harvesting periods, and yields of many of these plants have become erratic.¹ My opinions also are informed by coming of age around the start of the modern environmental movement.² While 16-year-old Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg inspired teenagers across the world with her proclamation in January 2019 that “our house is on fire,”³ which I applaud, I actually thought that “our house” was on fire 50 years ago.

This climate crisis didn’t show up unannounced. Some readers of this opinion piece may not believe that the climate crisis has been caused by human activity — and, therefore, cannot be corrected…