Commercial White Sage — anatomy of an ecological crisis

Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

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Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

— Les plantes-maîtresses, approchées par dévotion — ce qu'elles enseignent quand on les laisse être ce qu'elles sont.

Why we decline — TL;DR

INFUSE will not sell Salvia apiana. Five reasons, and they coil into one another.

1. A documented crisis of commercial overharvest. The Western 'sage smudging' boom since 2010 has multiplied commercial demand for Californian white sage fivefold to tenfold. Biologists at United Plant Savers and the rangers of the California national forests have been reporting massive illegal harvesting from wild stands since 2018.
2. A call from the Cherokee, Lakota, Navajo and Chumash to stop. Several tribal councils and North American Indigenous organizations (United Plant Savers in partnership with Chumash leaders, the Indigenous Environmental Network, and others) publicly asked, between 2018 and 2024, for an end to the non-Native trade in white sage.
3. A semantic confusion kept alive. The term 'smudge' has spread in the West as a synonym for any plant-based fumigation — when in fact it names a specific ceremonial practice of certain North American Indigenous nations, inseparable from their cosmological frame. To sell 'sage smudge' to anyone wanting to 'purify their energy' is an act of appropriation.
4. A narrow ecological habitat-niche. Salvia apiana is endemic to the Californian coast and Baja California in Mexico, on a specific kind of chaparral. That niche is already threatened by wildfire, urbanization and deepening drought. Trade piles onto an existing ecological stress.
5. Alternatives exist — European, South African, Mediterranean — that do not ask us to draw on a lineage and an ecosystem in crisis. INFUSE offers Imphepho, Mugwort, Rosemary, Bay — each within its own lineage.

The name as signature

Salvia apiana — the Latin epithet apiana comes from apis, the bee. The botanist Willis Linn Jepson, who described the species in 1908, chose this name because the plant is one of the most nectar-rich of the Californian chaparral. Before it was 'the plant of new-age smudges,' white sage is first of all the plant of the bees.

The word 'smudge' itself is an English term that originally named a thick smoke used to drive off insects (smudge fire, smudge pot). Its drift toward the sense of 'Indigenous ceremonial fumigation' happened in the twentieth century, mainly through white anthropologist-observers. It is not a Chumash word, nor Lakota, nor Navajo — each nation has its own terms for its own fumigation practices. Using 'smudge' as a global category erases that diversity.

The French name 'sauge blanche' lends itself to confusion: there are other white sages (Salvia officinalis 'Alba', Salvia argentea) that have nothing to do with Salvia apiana. This lexical confusion has let certain resellers present European garden sage under the term 'sage white' at inflated prices. Be wary.

The plant as a person

Salvia apiana is a plant of intense sun and rare rain. It grows in silvered tufts on the dry flanks of the Californian chaparral, where the fires pass every thirty to sixty years. It co-evolves with those fires: they stimulate its germination, they clear away competition. It is made for long cycles.

The discipline of the chaparral is its pedagogy. It teaches waiting, silence, the husbanding of water. When whole bunches of white sage are torn out to be dried into bundles sold for twelve dollars apiece on Etsy, you are not pulling a lettuce leaf — you are breaking a geological rhythm.

The plant is nectar-rich, but a demanding one. The native Californian bees (Andrena, Anthophora, Ceratina) co-evolved with its precise flowering window (April–July). To reduce its wild populations is also to starve a pollinator cohort already weakened by pesticides and the decline of native North American bees.

The history — from the chaparral to the Etsy basket

For the coastal Californian peoples — Chumash from Santa Barbara to Malibu, Tongva of the Los Angeles basin, Kumeyaay of San Diego, Cahuilla of Riverside — white sage is a plant of the threshold. The ethnographies of John Peabody Harrington in the early twentieth century (Smithsonian manuscript notes, partly published by Lowell Bean, Thomas Blackburn) mention it in precise contexts: purification after contact with death, preparation of a ritual song, the care of a sick person.

Through the twentieth century, by way of the pan-American exchanges (powwows, movements of cultural revitalization, the American Indian Movement from 1968 on), ritual fumigation practices spread between nations that did not originally share them. White sage thus came to be present in certain Lakota, Navajo and Cherokee rituals — but always within a tribal frame, transmitted and held.

The Western commercial turn sits roughly from the 1990s, accelerates in the 2000s with the wellness boom, and explodes between 2010 and 2020 with social media. The 'sage smudge bundle' becomes a standard product on Etsy, Amazon, Goop, Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie. Global demand is estimated at several hundred tonnes a year.

This commercial explosion happened both without the consent of the Californian Indigenous nations and without ecological control. The rangers of the San Bernardino, Cleveland and Angeles national forests have been reporting, since 2018, repeated seizures of hundreds of kilos of white sage harvested illegally on federal land (Los Angeles Times, 2018; Reuters, 2020).

The crisis — figures, dates, sources

Precise ecological data are missing (white sage holds no federal protected-species status, hence no systematic monitoring), but several signals converge.

• United Plant Savers (a non-profit organization founded by Rosemary Gladstar) placed Salvia apiana on its 'At-Risk' list in 2018, with an explicit recommendation to cease commercial wild harvest.
• The California Bureau of Land Management documented, between 2018 and 2023, several dozen arrests for illegal white-sage harvesting on federal land. A single operation in 2018 (San Bernardino National Forest) seized 200 kilos.
• The Californian 'cultivated' commercial chains (Mountain Rose Herbs and others) make up a minority fraction of the market. Most of the trade stays opaque, with a probable, untraceable mix of wild and cultivated.
• The Californian drought of 2012–2022, combined with the mega-fires of 2017–2020, has affected the natural chaparral habitat of white sage. To add commercial pressure to that ecological stress is untenable.
• Global demand has spread: European markets (new-age shops in Germany, France, the UK, Spain), Asian ones (Japan, Korea), North American ones outside the USA. The pressure on the Californian stands now comes from all over the world.

The 'cultivated white sage' trade, put forward as the ethical solution, raises the same problems as it does for peyote: cultivating Salvia apiana outside its native chaparral profoundly changes its chemistry (the cineole/pinene/camphor ratios vary with soil and climate), and the demand the trade creates — even cultivated — normalizes a practice of appropriation that falls back onto the wild.

Appropriation — why 'smudge' is not a neutral word

For decades, Indigenous practitioners have explained publicly that 'smudge' is no generic, transposable technique. It is a family of ceremonial practices, each anchored in a precise tribal cosmology. To sell a 'smudge kit' with Californian white sage, Californian abalone (itself overharvested), eagle feather (a federally protected species, illegal for non-Natives to possess) to a person wanting to 'clean their apartment' amounts to a triple violation: ecological, legal, cultural.

The #StopSelfishSpirituality movement, begun on social media by North American Indigenous practitioners from 2018, asks non-Native people specifically to stop buying, selling and promoting commercial 'sage smudging.' The ask is clear, public, repeated.

The argument 'but my Métis Cherokee grandmother passed it down to me' asks to be examined rigorously: most of the family-transmission stories invoked by non-Natives do not survive genealogical verification. The claim of distant, unverified Native American ancestry is one of the common mechanisms of appropriation.

Sourced alternatives that we offer

If the quest is the ritual fumigation of a place, a threshold, a transition, there are living traditions that do not demand drawing on California.

• Imphepho (Helichrysum odoratissimum) — the ancestral fumigation of the South African sangoma, grown ethically by certain growers (the Khanyisa Healing Garden among them), without pressure on the wild.
• European Mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris) — the fumigation of thresholds in pre-Christian and medieval Europe, an abundant, free plant in France.
• Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) — Mediterranean and Provençal fumigation, a local nectar-rich plant, without ecological pressure.
• Bay (Laurus nobilis) — ancient Greek fumigation (the oracle of Delphi), a free Mediterranean plant.
• Juniper (Juniperus communis) — Alpine, Scandinavian, Mongolian fumigation. Eastern red cedar (Juniperus virginiana — though avoid the overharvested kind). Choose plants local to your own geography.
• True frankincense (Boswellia sacra, B. carterii), traced and sourced from Yemen/Oman/Somalia — another tradition, with its own cautions to ask about regarding traceability.

Each has its own history, its own cosmology, its own ethic of harvest to honour. None 'replaces' the Chumash white sage. They do not try to. They trace their own ways.

Nuggets & legends

The Chumash, a coastal people of the Santa Barbara region, had developed a sophisticated marine cosmology centred on the tomol, the sewn-plank canoe. Their use of white sage took part in the preparation of sea voyages — purifying the tomol before it was put to water, collective prayer. This maritime dimension of Californian sage is almost always absent from the new-age accounts.

The botanist Willis Linn Jepson (1867–1946), who officially described Salvia apiana in 1908, was himself a defender of the Californian forests and one of the founders of the Save the Redwoods League. He would most likely have been horrified by the contemporary commercial fate of the plant he had named.

John Peabody Harrington (1884–1961), an ethnographer at the Smithsonian Institution, spent his life documenting the languages and knowledge of the Californian Indigenous peoples — the Chumash especially. He left behind more than a million pages of manuscript notes, of which only a fraction has been published. A significant part of the Chumash knowledge of plants (white sage included) still sleeps in those archives, undigitized.

The 'smudge stick' wrapped in red thread — the iconic image of contemporary wellness — has no roots in traditional Californian Indigenous ceremonial practice. The 'bundle' format is a twentieth-century commercial invention. Traditional Chumash, Tongva and Kumeyaay work with fresh or loose dried leaves, not compressed bunches.

The abalone (Haliotis spp.) often sold with smudge kits is itself in ecological crisis: Haliotis sorenseni (white abalone) has been classed critically endangered by the IUCN since 2001. To buy a typical 'smudge kit' with an abalone shell is to stack two ecological disasters into one product.

European garden sage (Salvia officinalis) has its own ritual history: the Romans held it sacred, the medievals called it the 'plant that saves' (salvia = that saves). Hildegard of Bingen devotes several chapters to it. This European tradition — rich, living, free — is largely ignored by the Europeans who import Californian white sage.

The #StopSelfishSpirituality movement, launched in 2018 by North American Indigenous practitioners on Instagram and Twitter, was never really a call to 'guilt-trip' — it was an invitation to learn, to shift, to find one's own lineages. The rejection of that call by part of the wellness market illustrates an ordinary cultural violence.

The native Californian bees (genera Andrena, Anthophora, Ceratina) that depend on the flowering of Salvia apiana in April–July are themselves affected by the global decline of pollinators. Every bunch of white sage harvested in full bloom deprives the pollinator cohort of a vital resource.

The Californian wildfires of 2017–2020 (Thomas Fire, Woolsey Fire, August Complex) burned hundreds of thousands of hectares of chaparral. The regeneration of Salvia apiana after fire takes five to fifteen years depending on intensity. To add commercial harvesting on zones in post-fire regeneration is to stack the pressures.

Main sources

• United Plant Savers — At-Risk Species List, Salvia apiana entry (2018, updated 2023). unitedplantsavers.org.
• Bean, L. J. & Saubel, K. S. — Temalpakh: Cahuilla Indian Knowledge and Usage of Plants. Malki Museum Press, Banning, CA, 1972.
• Timbrook, J. — Chumash Ethnobotany: Plant Knowledge Among the Chumash People of Southern California. Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, 2007.
• Harrington, J. P. — Smithsonian Institution manuscript notes on the Chumash, Tongva and Kumeyaay peoples (1907–1957, partly published).
• Keene, A. — Native Appropriations (academic blog, Brown University), articles on the appropriation of white sage, 2018–2023.
• Los Angeles Times — Articles on white-sage seizures by federal rangers, 2018–2023.
• Reuters — Reports on the white-sage commercial crisis, 2020–2022.
• Bureau of Land Management California — Arrest and seizure statistics on federal land, 2018–2024.
• Indigenous Environmental Network — Statements on the appropriation of sacred plants, 2019–2024.
• Center for World Indigenous Studies — Documents on tribal demands concerning the trade in ceremonial plants, 2018–2023.
• Gladstar, R. (United Plant Savers) — Official statements on Salvia apiana, November 2018.
• Indigenous Botanical Council — 2021 recommendations on Indigenous ceremonial plants.

Secondary sources

• Anderson, M. K. — Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources. University of California Press, 2005.
• Hildegard of Bingen — Physica (twelfth century), modern translations on European Salvia officinalis.
• Pendell, D. — Pharmako/Poeia: Plant Powers, Poisons, and Herbcraft. Mercury House, 1995 — chapters on the sages.
• Independent reporting on the global smudge market (Vice, The Guardian, El País, 2019–2023).
• Smithsonian Institution — National Anthropological Archives, Harrington collection (digitization in progress).
• Sobiecki, J.-F. — Comparative research on African ritual fumigations (Imphepho) vs North American ones (sage).
• Mountain Rose Herbs and other 'ethical' distributors — public sourcing statements (consulted 2024).
• IUCN documentation on Haliotis sorenseni (white abalone) — a critically endangered species associated with commercial 'smudge kits'.