Anya's Garden Perfumes + The Natural Perfumery Institute

Lemongrass plantation - Malaysia I've always been a dreamer and an optimist. Time to move forward with the project I touched upon in my last blog. Backstory: I dropped the ball in September of 2008 when I was scheduling a lunch with someone from the biggest vetiver distillation company in Haiti. That week, and the week following, huge storms swept Haiti, causing horrific flooding and loss of life. I figured to just back off as she took care of business, and I just felt superfluous to the problems they/she were facing, and lost contact with her. As I wrote recently, I'm going to direct efforts into reforestation efforts in Haiti, as soon as I can connect with a local agency. They're impossible to contact this week, but I'll keep at it. I'm also going to recontact my distillation connection for several reasons. I feel terrible I just gave up when faced with the situation in 2008. I guess I suffer from PTSD from all the hurricanes we get here in Florida, and ...

  After the Haiti Quake: Heal the Earth, Heal the People photo source: http://linknzona.blogspot.com/2008/12/environmental-quality-and-natural.html The Natural Perfumer is Not an artist 100% of the time,  they're a caring person 100% of the time: For me, our art is linked with our responsibility to the environment and other people. The image above shows the stark reality of the deforestation of Haiti in contrast to its contiguous neighbor, the Dominican Republic, to the right (east). The first thing that came to my mind when the horrific quake hit was that the people of the cities of Haiti can't flee the city for refuge in the countryside, because their countryside is bare, eroded earth. When it rains, and it will soon, those hills turn into mudslicks, and mudslides follow. Haiti has been plagued by mudslides for decades due to the systematic deforestation of the countryside. Thousands of years of topsoil, created slowly by the breakdown of the underlying rock ha...