Enjoy 7 Sessions Including:
4-Hours of Recordings Including...
- Why using sustainable herbs matters
- Herbal sustainability, wild harvesting & climate change
- Link between herb quality, sourcing & efficacy & your health
- Environmental Impact & Supply Chains
- Social Impact & How "fair" is the herbal supply chain (Fairtrade & Fair for Life)
- Sustainable production & international trade
- What can we as herbal consumers & natural health practitioners do?
Your Host:
Traci Webb
is the founding director, lead teacher and program designer of the Ayurvedic Living School which she founded in 2006 in Northern California where she and her cohort of female ayurveda luminaries guide women to become the healers of the future, and to reclaim their connection to their bodies, to the earth, to each other, and to their own inner knowing through the school's women-centered Ayurveda Life Mastery™️ Health & Life Coach & Nutritionist Training and Ayurveda Herbalist & Practitioner Trainings. Traci is passionate about empowering women to rise and to reclaim their power and their birthright as the self, family and community healers and leaders they were born to be. When not teaching, you will find her in her garden, kitchen or hiking amongst the ancient redwood forests.
Your Speakers (Live):
Ann Armbrecht
is a writer and anthropologist (PhD, Harvard 1995) and the director of the American Botanical Council’s Sustainable Herbs Program. She is the author of The Business of Botanicals: Exploring the Healing Promise of Plant Medicines in a Global Industry that documents her journey following herbs from seed to shelf. She is also the co-producer of the documentary Numen: The Healing Power of Plants and the author of the award-winning ethnographic memoir Thin Places: A Pilgrimage Home based on her research in Nepal. Ann was a 2017 Fulbright-Nehru Scholar documenting the supply chain of medicinal plants in India. She lives with her family in central Vermont.
Roy Upton, RH, Dip Ayu
is the President of the American Herbal Pharmacopoeia which he founded in 1995. He was a co-founder, President and Secretary of the American Herbalists Guild for many years. He has served as Director of Planetary Herbals. Roy serves as an adjunct faculty member and expert advisor for numerous herbal medicine schools and organizations in North America, Mainland China, Hong Kong, and India and is on the editorial board of numerous integrative medicine publications in the US and abroad. Roy and has co-authored, edited, and published more than 40 of the world’s most comprehensive quality documents and technical reviews on botanical ingredients. He has also authored or co-authored numerous herbal research articles and several books. His work in the early 1990s, was highly influential in ensuring the passage of the dietary supplement health and education act (DSHEA). He was the recipient of the James Lind Scientific Achievement Award in 2004, the American Herbal Products Association Herbal Insight Award in 2011 and 2012, the James Duke Excellence in Botanical Literature Award in 2011, the prestigious Varro E. Tyler Excellence in Botanical Research award from the American Society of Pharmacognosy in 2012, the Business Achievement Award from Nutrition Business Journal in 2019, and the Ethnopharmacologist of the Year award from the International Society for Ethnopharmacology in 2020. Roy is himself a practitioner of traditional medicines with studies ranging from Native American Ethnobotany, Traditional Chinese Medicine & Ayurvedic Medicine. He has lived abroad to study Native American communities and ethnobotanical traditions of the Caribbean in St. Thomas, United States Virgin Islands, completed a three-year California state-approved clinical internship in traditional Chinese medicine with Michael Tierra and then trained at the Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and Longhua Hospital, Shanghai, China, and is also a certified Ayurveda Health Counselor. Roy is passionate about protecting and promoting access to herbal medicines and seeing botanical medicines integrated into all aspects of home and institutional care.
Vicky Murray
is a freelance sustainability advisor and recently worked with the Herbal Alliance’s Herbal Supply and Sustainability Community Action Team (CAT) on their sustainability review. Vicky has worked as a sustainability professional for over 20 years, including heading up sustainability projects at Pukka Herbs and before that at Neal’s Yard Remedies. She has a deep knowledge in the sustainability of herbal supply chains and a profound love of herbs. With a knack for making complex sustainability challenges easy to understand, Vicky specializes in facilitating organizations and groups through processes to understand their response to sustainability challenges, and to take action. She also loves a dance floor and runs North Devon Silent Disco as a side hustle with her DJ and event producer husband Nick. She lives with her family in North Devon, UK.
Your Speakers (Pre-Recorded):
Sebastian Pole, Pukka Herbs
Co-founder of Pukka Herbs and Mastery Herbsmith who has been in clinical practice for 23 years (since 1998) using a blend of Ayurvedic, Chinese and Western herbal medicine and has pioneered organic and FairWild practitioner-grade herbs and the norm at Pukka. He’s got a degree in Hindi and Indian Religions and is a registered Yoga Therapist. He’s a member of the Ayurvedic Practitioners Association, Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine and the Unified Register of Herbal Practitioners. He’s also fluent in Hindi. Sebastian is also the author of: Ayurvedic Medicine: The Principles of Traditional Practice.
Anastasiya Timoshyna, TRAFFIC
Director of Strategy, Programme & Impact of TRAFFIC. She’s the Senior Programme Coordinator of Sustainable Trade at TRAFFIC. Traffic has over 170 staff working on five continents towards the shared goal of reducing the pressure of unsustainable trade on natural biodiversity. In this role, she coordinates work around advising governments on developing better regulations to ensure trade is sustainable, developing private sector standards, engaging businesses and facilitating consumer behavioral change. She has 14 years experience working on issues of wildlife rade, including the focus on trade in wild plant ingredients. Her work has involved projects in East and Southern Africa, Viet Nam, India, Nepal, China, and Europe. Anastasiya has an educational background in ecology, environmental policy and corporate environmental management. She is a Co-Chair of the IUCN/SSC Medicinal Plant Specialists Group, a member of the Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group.
Anthony Booker, PhD (Ethnopharmacy)
Anthony attained his PhD from University College London in Ethnopharmacy and Pharmacognosy in 2014. His research thesis focused on the value chains of Curcuma longa (Turmeric) and how different value chains can affect both the livelihoods of the producing farmers and the quality of the finished products. Two post-doctoral projects investigated the quality of herbal medicinal products and their ingredients. He’s been published in a wide variety of scientific journals and books and his current research interests are focused on the use of plant metabolomics and how this can be used to improve the quality of traditional medicines. Anthony is currently a senior lecturer in Ethnopharmacology and medicine plant science at the University of Westminster, UCL School of Pharmacy. He’s also an associate editor for Frontiers in Ethnopharmacology. He’s a member of the British Pharmacopoeia, and expert advisory group on Complimentary Medicines, a Member of the Register of Chinese Herbal Medicine, the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a Fellow of the Linnean Society.
Erin Smith, Banyan Botanicals
Erin is the VP of Herbal Science & Research at Banyan Botanicals. Erin Smith is a clinical herbalist and ethnobotanist who has been working with medicinal plants for over 30 years. She was the Founding Director of the Center for Integrative Botanical Studies who spent more than twelve years living and working abroad in over twenty countries. Erin received her MSc in Ethnobotany with distinction from the University of Kent in Canterbury, where her thesis focused on women’s knowledge of traditional medicine in Morocco and was a visiting scholar in Medical Anthropology at Oxford University. For ten years she worked internationally with indigenous and local communities on various issues surrounding traditional medicine, natural resource management, community-based conservation, and traditional knowledge. She was Head Researcher for a joint project with the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations and Wageningen University in Netherlands on a project that explored livelihoods, female-headed households, and the use of plant resources in Tigray, Ethiopia. She worked with Global Diversity Foundation, an international NGO focusing on promoting biocultural diversity (including traditional medicinal knowledge and use) through partnership with indigenous and local communities, in the UK and Morocco for more than six years and is the former Managing Director of Global Diversity Foundation–North America. She was a researcher and project coordinator with Global Initiative for Traditional Systems (GIFTS) of Health with Dr. Gerard Bodeker, which included a project surrounding Islamic health traditions
Sponsored by the Ayurvedic Living School