ESSENTIAL OILS STATEMENT
This year you’ll see that some of your favorite Scrapberry Farm products might have different, or even fewer, ingredients.
I used very few essential oils to begin with, but I’ve been looking at my recipes and thinking of ways to reduce them even further. Whole plant products are the way to go.
(A hat tip to Renée Camila @layerbabuenaherbs and her recent @theherbalhighway podcast episode for helping me organize my thinking here.)
Essential oils are needlessly extractive and represent a colonizer mindset. Let’s unpack that idea. Colonialism takes many forms. As the settler— you know this one— you occupy things and claims it for yourself, killing everyone who disagrees. As colonialist planters, you produce the hell out a single crop and “import” disposable labor when you need to grow even more. Then we get things like NIMBYism and Australia (hello, have some convicts!). Dear Algeria, we’ve got some atomic business to drop off.
And then there’s extractive colonialism: destroy everything to claim all the raw materials found in a specific place. Beavers, bison, gold, bat shit, and sandalwood are historic examples… but how about white sage, palo santo, crystals, fracked oil? The list goes on and on.
To warp one’s mind in order to conceive of living beings as commodities, a means to an end, is at the very center of the colonizer mindset.
By using essential oils, we continue and contribute to colonization.
We need a little reciprocity. The plants need a little reciprocity. I think they’re demanding it, actually, and I’m not sure most of us are listening. Are you listening?
ESSENTIAL OILS STATEMENT
This year you’ll see that some of your favorite Scrapberry Farm products might have different, or even fewer, ingredients.
I used very few essential oils to begin with, but I’ve been looking at my recipes and thinking of ways to reduce them even further. Whole plant products are the way to go.
(A hat tip to Renée Camila @layerbabuenaherbs and her recent @theherbalhighway podcast episode for helping me organize my thinking here.)
Essential oils are needlessly extractive and represent a colonizer mindset. Let’s unpack that idea. Colonialism takes many forms. As the settler— you know this one— you occupy things and claims it for yourself, killing everyone who disagrees. As colonialist planters, you produce the hell out a single crop and “import” disposable labor when you need to grow even more. Then we get things like NIMBYism and Australia (hello, have some convicts!). Dear Algeria, we’ve got some atomic business to drop off.
And then there’s extractive colonialism: destroy everything to claim all the raw materials found in a specific place. Beavers, bison, gold, bat shit, and sandalwood are historic examples… but how about white sage, palo santo, crystals, fracked oil? The list goes on and on.
To warp one’s mind in order to conceive of living beings as commodities, a means to an end, is at the very center of the colonizer mindset.
By using essential oils, we continue and contribute to colonization.
We need a little reciprocity. The plants need a little reciprocity. I think they’re demanding it, actually, and I’m not sure most of us are listening. Are you listening?