Oh my god I'm sooooo mad right now
So. I have no business telling people not to collect wild plants/materials.
The words "wildcrafted," and "foraged," even "sustainably harvested," are terrifying to see in an ad on Etsy or Instagram
There is a such thing as the honorable harvest where you ASK the plant if it is okay to take, with the intention of listening if the answer is NO. Robin Wall Kimmerer talked about this, She did not make it up, it is an ancient and basic guideline of treating the plants with respect.
Basically it is not wrong to use plants and other living things, even if this means taking their life. But you are not the main character. You have to reflect on your knowledge of the organism's life cycle and its role in the ecosystem, so you can know you are not damaging the ecosystem. You have to only take what you need and avoid depleting the population.
Mary Siisip Geniusz also talked about it in an enlightening way in her book Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have To Do is Ask. She gave an example of a woman who was on an island and needed to use a medicinal herb to heal her injured leg or she would not survive the winter. In that situation she had to use up all of the plant that was on the island. This was permissible, even though it eliminated the local population, because she had to do it to save her life. But in return the woman had the responsibility to later return to the island and plant seeds of that plant.
And what makes me absolutely furious, is that there are a bunch of people online who have vaguely copied this philosophy of sustainability in a false and insulting way, saying "wildcrafted" or "foraged" materials to be all trendy and cool and in touch with nature, when it is actually just poaching.
If you are from a capitalistic culture the honorable harvest is very hard and unintuitive to learn to practice. I am not very good at it still. This is why it is suspicious if someone is confident that they can ethically and respectfully harvest wild materials with money involved.
So there's this lichen that is often called "reindeer moss." It looks like this:
It grows only a few millimeters a year.
This is "preserved" reindeer moss.
It is from Etsy, similar is also sold in many other online shops, many of which have the audacity to describe it as a "plant" for decorations and terrariums that needs no maintenance.
It is not maintenance-free, it is dead. It has been spray-painted a horrible shade of green. The people buying it clearly don't even know what it is. It is a popular crafting material for "fairy houses," whatever the hell those are. So is moss, also dead, spray-painted, and wild-harvested. Supposedly reindeer moss is harvested sustainably in Finland, where it is abundant, for the craft industry. However poaching of lichens and mosses is absolutely rampant.
It's even more upsetting because there's hardly any articles drawing attention to the problem. This one is from 1999. And the poaching is still going on.
There is a "moss" section on Etsy, and it is so upsetting
These mosses and lichens were collected from the wild. Most of the shops are in the Pacific Northwest or Appalachia, which are the major locations of moss and lichen poaching. There are some shops based in Appalachia selling "foraged" reindeer moss.
Reindeer moss may be abundant in Finland, but in Appalachia it should NOT be harvested to be sold on Etsy as craft supplies! Moss doesn't grow quickly. Big, healthy colonies like this took years to grow. Some of these shops have thousands of sales, all of bags and bags of moss and lichen, and thinking of how much moss and lichen that must be, I am filled with horror.
Clubmosses do not transplant well, and these ones have no roots. The buyers do not realize they have bought a dead plant because clubmoss stays green and pliable after it is dead.
This is especially awful because in Mary Siisip Geniusz's book she talked about clubmosses being poached so much for Christmas wreaths that they had almost disappeared from a lot of forests.
I don't even know if this is illegal if it's not a formally endangered species so I don't know if I can report them I'm just. really sad and angry
