Refreshing the dashboard for the 113th time since lunch, I watched the cursor blink with a rhythmic, mocking stability. I am Finley P.-A., and my job-curating datasets for machine learning models that are supposed to distinguish “truth” from “hallucination”-has made me chronically suspicious of adjectives. When a system tells me a product is “handcrafted” or “ethically sourced,” I don’t see a value judgment; I see a data point missing a citation.

Earlier today, I experienced a moment of peak human error that perfectly mirrors the systemic failures of the sustainability industry. I was sitting in a crowded cafe, spiraling through a spreadsheet of botanical suppliers, when I saw someone across the room waving enthusiastically. Without thinking, I hoisted my hand and gave a wide, confident wave back, complete with a sheepish grin. A second later, I realized they were waving at their brother standing exactly three feet behind me. The heat that rose in my neck was a physical reminder of how easy it is to accept a signal that wasn’t meant for you, simply because you want to be part of the conversation.

This is exactly how we treat “sustainable” sourcing. We see the wave-the green leaf icon on the packaging, the “earth-friendly” font-and we wave back, assuming the signal is directed at our values. We don’t look behind us to see if there’s actually any substance there.

The 23-Day Audit

I spent the last 23 days attempting a small experiment. Acting as a procurement agent for a hypothetical craft-supply cooperative, I reached out to 33 different suppliers of specialty botanical barks and roots. My request was simple: I wanted to see the harvest documentation. Not a marketing blurb, not a mission statement, but the actual logs. I wanted to know the name of a single harvester in the field, the specific date of a single 2023 batch, and a description of the post-harvest health of the parent trees.

By the end of the week, the results were a masterclass in corporate opacity. Out of those 33 inquiries, I received exactly 23 silences. Nine of the remaining suppliers sent me identical PDFs that looked like they had been photocopied in 1993, containing vague “certificates of authenticity” that lacked any specific batch numbers or locations. One supplier sent a defensive, three-paragraph email explaining that such information was “proprietary trade secret,” as if the name of a village in Brazil was a formula for cold fusion.

Only 3 suppliers actually picked up the phone or sent a personalized response. Two of them were honest enough to admit they didn’t have the data but “trusted their middleman.” Only one-the 33rd on my list-called me back unprompted to ask if I wanted GPS coordinates for the harvest sites.

The Anatomy of Sustainable Boredom

The problem is that “sustainable” has become a checkbox that costs exactly $0 to claim and nearly as much to verify. In the world of bark and root extraction, true sustainability is incredibly boring. It doesn’t look like a high-definition video of a jungle; it looks like a 13-year relationship with three families in a specific region of Mexico or Brazil. It looks like a written agreement that says, “We will not buy from you for the next 3 years because this grove needs to recover.” It is the willingness to refuse a harvest when the market price is high but the parent tree is not ready.

We have a strange relationship with the “extractive” nature of our world. We want the benefits of the root-the dyes, the tannins, the medicinal properties-but we want to believe the root just manifested in a plastic bag. When you pull a root or strip bark, you are making a choice about the life of a tree. If you take too much, or take it at the wrong time, the tree dies. It’s that simple. And yet, when you ask a supplier how they ensure the tree’s survival, they point to a graphic of a globe on their homepage.

This is where the data curator in me starts to twitch. In my work, we talk about “ground truth.” It’s the direct observation of a phenomenon, unmediated by inference or hope. In the world of sourcing, ground truth is a muddy boot. It’s a signature on a ledger in a language you might not speak. It is the granular, unglamorous work of direct partnership.

The Game of Telephone

I’ve found that the length of the supply chain is inversely proportional to the truth of the sustainability claim. If there are 13 middlemen between the forest and your doorstep, the “ethical” label is just a game of telephone. By the time the message reaches you, it’s been polished and sanded down until all the uncomfortable realities of labor and land management have been removed.

The few companies that do this right are usually the ones that don’t lead with the loudest slogans. They lead with the most boring data. They can tell you why a harvest was delayed by 3 months because of a specific rainfall pattern. They know the names of the children of the people doing the harvesting. This isn’t just “good business”; it’s the only way to ensure the resource exists 23 years from now. This level of granular detail is what defines the model at

Mimosa Root USA, where the track record isn’t built on a fleeting trend but on a decade of actually knowing where the shovel hits the dirt.

When we stop asking for the boring details, we give permission for the fiction to continue. I realize now that my embarrassment in the cafe-waving at a stranger who wasn’t looking at me-is the same embarrassment we should feel when we buy a “sustainable” product without knowing a single thing about its origin. We are waving at a ghost. We are participating in a social ritual that has no recipient.

The cost of verification is high. It costs time to Vet a supplier. It costs money to pay harvesters a wage that allows them to say “no” to an over-harvest. It costs emotional labor to maintain a relationship across borders and cultures for 13 years instead of just finding the cheapest price on a wholesale platform.

But the cost of not verifying is higher. It’s the cost of a forest that looks green on a satellite map but is biologically silent. It’s the cost of our own integrity, which we trade away for the comfort of a label we know is likely a lie.

The Light and the Shadow

I think back to those 33 emails I sent. The defensive email was the most telling. The supplier was angry that I asked for documentation. They felt that their “reputation” should be enough. But reputation is just a shadow; documentation is the light that casts it. If you move the light, the shadow changes. If you have no documentation, you’re just standing in the dark, telling everyone you’re wearing a green shirt.

“In my curator role, when I find a piece of data that is ‘too clean,’ I flag it for review. Real-world data is messy. It has outliers. It has mistakes. An ethical harvest log should have mistakes.”

It should show that one year the yield was 43 percent lower because of a pest. It should show that a batch was rejected because it didn’t meet the standards. If a supplier tells you everything is perfect, every time, forever-they are hallucinating.

We need to become better auditors of our own consumption. We need to be the person who asks the uncomfortable question at the dinner party, not to be a contrarian, but because we actually care about the answer. We need to be willing to sit with the silence of the 23 suppliers who didn’t respond and realize that their silence is, in itself, a very loud answer.

Calling the Fiction

I am still learning to sit with my own errors, like that misplaced wave in the cafe. I had to acknowledge that I was seeking a connection that wasn’t there. Sourcing is the same. We seek a connection to the earth through the things we buy, but if the supply chain is a lie, that connection is a hallucination.

As I close my spreadsheet for the night, the 103-degree heat of the afternoon finally fading from the air, I’m reminded that the “polite fiction” of sustainability only survives because we are too polite to call it a fiction. We don’t want to ruin the vibe. We don’t want to admit that our “ethical” hobby might be built on someone else’s exploited land.

But I’d rather have the awkward conversation. I’d rather read a 33-page harvest report that is dry and technical than a 3-sentence marketing blurb that is “inspirational.” Give me the mud. Give me the dates. Give me the names of the harvesters who have been tending the same groves since 2003.

Everything else is just waving at a stranger in a crowded room, hoping they’re looking at you, while the person they actually care about is standing right behind you, waiting for them to come home.

Verification isn’t a burden; it’s the highest form of respect we can pay to the natural world. It’s saying, “I see you, and I care enough to make sure you’re still there tomorrow.” And that, quite frankly, is a lot more interesting than a checkbox.