Running an Environmentally Responsible Practice

INTRODUCTION

Having “marked our card” by surveying the Herb Trade in the first “Greening” report, we would quickly be vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy if we weren’t even busier cleaning up our own act as practitioners. However lyrical we might wax about the work of herbalists, we are also inevitably running small businesses – we all use heating, lighting and water, we all use bottles, cardboard and detergents, and we need to deepen our approach to “treading lightly on the planet” with as much of it as we possibly can.

But we don’t want to be seen to be lecturing! One of the startling truths for the authors is to realise that however leading-edge green we might have thought we were, every single one of us have found areas in which we need to make progress. One herbalist may be doing pioneering work with community herbal medicine but with the aid of a wifi computer set-up. Another may have learnt to live a happy life of astounding austerity but nevertheless flies off to see family (in an aircraft, that is!) several times a year. So, we have to remind ourselves that everybody has different starting points and will travel at different paces – so long as we’ve all stepped onto the road and keep moving.

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