This past summer I’ve been taking time to reflect on what the Sustainable Herbs Initiative has achieved and what my vision is for our work moving forward. I recently reached out to Will Rosenzweig, Founder and Faculty Steward of the Sustainable Food Initiative at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley for advice.
He asked what success looks like for me. I thought for a moment and realized I didn’t really know.
So later, I gave it some thought and wrote what came to mind:
Short term success is that companies are diving deep into the sourcing of one ingredient in the first year, following Josef Brinckmann’s advice of picking one plant and beginning there. In five years, SHI is recognized as a leader in convening and curating and educating around deeper values, serving as a value holder, offering resources and programs on retaining values and integrity in purpose driven companies in the herbal products industry.
This felt a bit narrow and lame and not very inspiring.
Asking the Plants
So, I tried again, this time, from a different place. I put my pen down. I closed my eyes and settled into my chair.
And asked, what does success look like?
I found myself in a field where I often go when I’m looking for guidance. Someone appeared, I couldn’t sense who, and led me into the center of a circle, not just a circle of plants, which is where I’m often led, with motherwort, black cohosh, lemon balm and so many more. This time there were also trees: ash, oak, white pine, spruce. The hummingbirds and bees, so many different kinds of bees, from my garden. The wren. The sparrow. And the crickets so strong now as the season shifts to early fall. And children. So many playing on the edge.
There is a cushion in the center, so I sit. As always I wasn’t sure what would unfold. So I waited. And then someone from the circle, I couldn’t tell who, spoke:
“Well, for starters, success means we are all here. We’re all still alive. We all have a home, the children too.”
They pause to let that settle.
Another voice added, “Success means that the people and companies in your network don’t destroy that or make it impossible.”
Another pause to let that settle.
I say that I’m not sure that’s a business model.
“What is business for if not to support life?” I hear someone say. “Name that as the goal of this work. It is not just to sell a product. It is to sell products that are truly about healing. That means asking hard questions about the impacts of all steps of production. To ask: is this action in the service of the web of life? And then to ask, what do I need to know to truthfully answer that question?”
“If you don’t know where your herbs are sourced, you can’t even begin.”
And so, my vision of success is that SHI members are on a path to support the web of life. And that’s a journey because we live in a world that is fundamentally against that web of life, that is based on undermining it at almost every step of the journey. And so, anyone who claims they have arrived isn’t telling the truth.
The value companies get is a space to ask these questions and to answer them honestly in a community that is working collectively to take action to address where we fall short.
And so this depends, also, on showing customers how to ask the harder questions and how to interpret the answers so they can know where companies are cutting corners.
Find out more about our work here.