Historical Perspective

There is a long history of using nontimber products gathered from the forests of southern Appalachia (Ellison 2001). Native Americans traditionally used forest plants for tools, food, medicine, and religious ceremonies. They used bark for housing, branches and stems for utensils and tools, and wood for containers and other household products. In the Cherokee Nation, plants and plant products were fully integrated into personal lives, as well as all social activities.

The earliest recorded contact between Europeans and the Cherokee was in 1540, when the Spanish explorer DeSoto led his army through their lands. When early European settlers moved into the southern forestlands, they brought with them items needed to sustain their lives: a supply of food, tools to make shelters, seeds to start crops, and herbal medicines to cure ailments. When these stores were depleted, the settlers looked to local resources and learned from the Native Americans that the forests had value well beyond that of timber.

Much of the knowledge gained from Native Americans is the foundation of the herbal medicinal industry today in the United States (Ody 1993). Over the course of three centuries, more than 400 medicinal forest products used by the Cherokee have been documented (Chiltoskey and others). Some of the plants identified as important include sassafras (Sassafras albidum), marshmallow (Althaea officinlis), wild indigo (Baptisia tinctoria), solomons seal (Polygonatum biflorum), agrimony (Agrimonia eupatoria), and snakeroot (Aristolochia serpentaria).

As interaction between Native Americans and the settlers increased, forest harvested plants became commonplace in settlers households. Before long, forest harvested foods were served in the homes of settlers and household pharmacies became stocked with herbal remedies from Native American plants. Soon entrepreneurs were collecting, processing and shipping to England NTFPs harvested from the New World.

During the 1800s, the United States and the NTFP industry were changing rapidly. Prior to exploration and settlement of western parts of this country, the eastern forests were the source of domestic harvested NTFPs. This began to change after 1804 when Thomas Jefferson sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to explore the Pacific Northwest. Over the next 40 years, new NTFPs  were identified and marketed. By 1840, more than 200 years after the first colonies in the East were founded, migration across the Great Plains was well underway. By this time, the markets for NTFPs harvested from eastern forests were well established. Consequently, the East has a much longer history of trade and use of NTFPs by European settlers.

Political turmoil and Civil War in the United States in the mid-1800s increased the need to explore the forests for new and substitute products. In the South, there was a particularly acute need to find substitutes for imported products. By 1863, due to port blockades, the South was in dire need of most medicinal products that had been purchased from abroad. A field surgeon was pulled from his duties to explore the forest resources of the Confederate States for plants that might be used instead of European imports (Porcher 1970, reprinted from 1863). The surgeon identified more than 400 substitutes. Porcher (1970) reported that soldiers collected the following species in Confederate States: dogwood (Cornus spp. as a quinine substitute), tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera for fevers), sweet gum (Liquidambar styraciflua for diarrhea), and mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum as a laxative).

The discovery of synthetic substitutes for natural products changed the medicinal forest products  industry in the early 1900s. In the beginning of the 20th century, there was an almost total rejection of medicinal plant remedies and a shift to synthetic drugs. Peddlers of tonics, tinctures and cure-alls swarmed throughout the country and medical fraud was common. The Federal Government responded by enacting The Food and Drug Act of 1906 (U.S. Code 34 Stat 768) and the subsequent 1912 Sherley Amendment (U.S. Code 37 Stat 416), which helped to eliminate mislabeling and adulteration of herbal medicines (Foster 1995).

Federal legislation continued to restrict the trade and use of medicinal plants. The Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (U.S. Code 52 Stat 1040) increased the restrictions on trade of herbal medicines by requiring that drugs be proven safe before entering interstate commerce. The Drug Amendments of 1962 (U.S. Code 52 Stat 780) required that drugs be proven effective. As a result, in 1972 the Federal Government initiated a comprehensive review of more than 300,000 over-the-counter (OTC) drugs. According to Foster (1995), of the 258 OTC ingredients the government considered ineffective, most were botanical.

In the early 1990s a series of major events helped spark a renewed interest in nontimber forest products. Pressure from environmental groups to halt clearcutting, road construction, and loss of critical wildlife habitat resulted in restricted timber harvesting on most national forests in the West. Because of this, unemployment in the forest products industry in some areas soared. At approximately the same time, bumper crops of edible mushrooms appeared on many national forest lands in Oregon and Washington, as a result of major forest fires (Freed 1994). Displaced loggers and commercial pickers traveled to burned areas to collect highly valued mushrooms. Because of this surge in activities, the U.S. Forest Service, the Canadian Forest Service, several state forestry departments and private companies commissioned studies on the market potential of NTFPs (for example, Mater Engineering 1992, 1993, and 1994). Conferences and special seminar series were organized to help unite the many diverse factions involved in the trade and use of NTFPs (Schnepf 1994, Vance and Thomas 1997).

Also during the early 1990s, medical research findings helped to increase demand for NTFPs. The positive effects of taxol on various cancers greatly increased demand for this drug and the bark of the tree from whence it originated. By 1994 taxol was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treatment of ovarian and some forms of breast cancer. Further interest in herbal medicinal products was spawned by a 1993 Harvard Medical School study (Eisenberg and others 1993) showing that millions of Americans regularly used alternative medicines. Reports by the distinguished research journals, the Journal of the American Medical Association (Le Bars and others 1997) and Scientific American (Stix 1998) on the benefits of Ginko biloba in treating slow dementia and St. Johns Wort in fighting depression further fueled the growing interest in botanical medicines.

References

• Additional NTFP References