Everyday Foods & Cosmetics That Use Wild Plants May Be Harming The Environment

For over two decades, I acted on not using products not tested on animals. Good news is that it has gotten enough traction now that many countries and corporations have banned it. But yet, there is a lot of work to be done. 

Learning and applying that learning in action continues until one's last breath. In Buddhist terms - "Do it over and over again. Untiringly."  

For the past few years, there has been this new issue with food and cosmetics - think Almond milk to Shea body lotion to Himalayan pink salt. 

This national geographic article is a good start for one to raise awareness and to act on it: 

The chocolate you eat, the moisturizer you use, the tea you drink—these everyday products contain ingredients from wild plants. The way those plants—many of them threatened—are harvested may be damaging the environment and exploiting workers, a recent report found.

The UN-affiliated report by wildlife trade experts highlights 12 plants: frankincense, shea, Brazil nut, juniper, licorice, baobab, argan, candelilla, pygeum, jatamansi, gum arabic, and goldenseal.

Plant derivatives in household products often have “flown under the radar,” says Caitlin Schindler, lead author of the report and a project manager at Traffic, a nonprofit that monitors the sustainability of the wildlife trade. They “sit there somewhere in the middle of the ingredients list” on product labels. Even if consumers notice ingredient names, there’s no information about what’s involved in obtaining or processing them.

For example, about 20,000 Brazilians’ income depends directly or indirectly on the harvesting of Brazil nuts, which are one of the most widely consumed tree nuts in the world and are vulnerable to extinction. Entire families often come from neighboring regions to harvest the nuts, living in temporary forest camps, which provide poor shelter and no access to clean water. Here, workers risk being stung by scorpions, struck by heavy falling fruit, and attacked by jaguars. After the nuts are sold, importing countries profit, marking up the price about 2.5 times, even though no further processing is required.