184 Forests
Harvesting medicine from the forest
Near the Bay of Bengal in India, many people go to traditional healers when
they are sick. These healers make medicines from plants gathered in the forest.
One day, people from a non-governmental organization (NGO) came to a village
there to help people earn money by gathering these medicinal plants and selling
them in the city. By using their organization to sell these medicines, they helped
the community make money from the forest without cutting down trees.
The villagers were glad to have a new way to earn money, and many people
began to collect and sell the medicinal plants. But they did not ask the healers
how to collect the plants without damaging them, and they were not careful
about how much they gathered.
In their excitement to earn money, some villagers harmed the trees they
collected from. Instead of digging around a tree to collect a few roots some
people cut down the whole tree. In a short time, the medicinal plants had
mostly disappeared from the forest. This left traditional healers with no
plants to use for healing. So the villagers had to spend a lot of money to buy
medicines at the pharmacy when they were sick. In the end, the health of both
the people and the forest suffered from harvesting plants in a way that did not
protect them for the future.
A Community Guide to Environmental Health 2012