Posted on 12/21/2025 5:35:31 PM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
The precious, fragrant resin is the scent of the festive season and rising in popularity in the wellness industry – but its natural source is being decimated.
Salaban Salad Muse has built his whole life around frankincense.
Living the small town of Dayaha in the Sanaag region of Somaliland, a breakaway region of Somalia, he works as a seasoned harvester of the famously aromatic resin, obtained only from the Boswellia tree.
Every year, Salad Muse camps for three to six months in a cave near the site he owns with these trees on it. Each day he heads out the land, owned and tended by his family for generations. He moves from tree to tree, inspecting the bark for pests, scraping back sand and tending to seedlings he planted earlier in the season.
But the fate of these groves, and the entire livelihood of frankincense harvesters, is hanging in the balance. As groves fail, the local and global industries built up around frankincense are being forced to reconsider how this precious substance is produced, traced and sold around the world.
Frankincense is a resin produced by various species of Boswellia tree, such as these B. sacra trees in Somaliland which are classified as near threatened (Credit: Stephen Johnson)
Frankincense is famously associated with the biblical sacred offering gifted to the baby Jesus alongside gold and myrrh from the three magi. It has also been used for millennia in Indian and Chinese medicines, it is of the oldest commodities traded globally. Today it has become a staple of the $5.6tn (£4.2tn) wellness industry, used to produce a fragrant cloud of smoke used for meditation and medicinal healing, as well as the rituals woven into centuries of Catholic worship.
For Salad Muse, however, it has far...
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Ah, climate change. Is there anything it can’t do?!
It can’t scare anyone on FR.
That is critical. < /sarc>
But wait there’s myrrh.
I’ll stick with gold.
Sorry, I was distracted by…. Salad Muse!
It doesn’t make any cense.
😂😁😇😆😆😆😆....
Bad JuJu. Frankincense keep Debbil away.
My mom keeps Frankincense essential oils on hand for her arthritis.
I’ve used it for my arthritis and my carpal tunnel syndrome. The pain doesn’t completely go away, but the frankincense essential oil does help.
The Boswellia tree can grow elsewhere in the world.
Its time to start growing them to make some big money.
The country of Mexico has to be a possibility.
Or even New Mexico/Arizona?
Obviously global warming and has nothing to do with third world resource management practices.
“Incense and peppermint, meaningless nouns”
LOL! You win the internet today!
Frankincense? I’ll just use myrrh instead.
The four main species of Boswellia, B. sacra (synonyms B. carteri and B. bhaw-dajiana), B. frereana, B. papyrifera, and B. serrata,[3] produce true frankincense, and each type of resin is available in various grades. The grades depend on the time of harvesting, and the resin is hand sorted for quality.…
Wouldn’t it be funny if God started a count-down on human civilization that began on the birth of his son and ended when we ran out of frankencense?
Interesting.
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