I like the smell of dragons blood incense but I don't want to buy it if it's from an endangered species.

In before someone makes a joke about it being from real mythical dragons

  • ReadFanon [any, any]
    ·
    1 month ago

    I don't know for sure, and I don't think that anyone could without a genuine non-Kimberley/non-Fair Trade/other bogus certification process in place, but it appears as though most dragon's blood resin that is commercially available is harvested from the fruit of a type of rattan palm.

    (That's operating on the assumption that dragon's blood incense isn't a synthetic fragrance that has been developed to mimic "genuine" dragon's blood incense at a lower cost of production.)

    It's hard to know a lot about this production process but if you're harvesting the resin from the fruit of a tree then that's more sustainable for habitats since you aren't harming or cutting the trees themselves down. It's hard to imagine a stable supply chain that sources all of its dragon's blood resin from threatened dracaena trees on Socotra without it coming at a hefty premium that would make your eyes water at the cost of true Socotran dragon's blood resin incense, especially if a country like Indonesia can mass produce a very similar resin in a relatively sustainable way.

    I'd withhold judgement until you get more solid information but, at a wild guess, I think that it's probably not a huge concern.

    Also note that crunchy stuff like this loves to market itself as being produced from ingredients from exotic locations by native peoples from some rare source that is of spiritual/cultural/environmental significance. Himalayan sea salt invokes notions of Tibetan Buddhist monks using hand tools to mindfully carve out small amounts of magical, spiritual salt from traditional meditation caves because of the conscious choice of labelling it that way. It doesn't invoke notions of Pakistani Muslims using modern machinery to carve out huge blocks of salt from their salt mines because people are less inclined to give salt mined that way some aura of faux-spirituality and reverence due to that dualistic nature of orientalism ("Eww, yucky brown Muslims are dirty and sneaky and untrustworthy!!"/"Wow, those Asian Buddhists are so noble and glorious and spiritually in tune with compassion and the environment. So wholesome!!" – both are gross and interdependent in a dialectical sense imo, although one is much more benign than the other.) I would view any information on the back of a product that is marketed to a crunchy demographic with deep skepticism personally. There's basically no regulations about whatever bullshit fairytale a product like this can spin. Yay capitalism!

    • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      Since the resin produced by Dracaena spp. and Calamus spp. is the same, it's quite convenient to just cultivate a huge amount of C. rotang, C. javensis, and C. caesius in the undergrowth of rubber plantations in southeast Asia. It grows like grass would, so it's very likely not even something that has to be intentionally cultivated on a lot of these farms.

      The resin itself is mostly a byproduct of the rattan which is primarily grown for wickerwork. Basically just a bonus extra thing you can sell to crunchies while you're growing rattan as a secondary crop in between your rubber trees. I can't imagine anyone bothering to create a synthetic process to produce something that's otherwise just a free waste product of something massively cultivated for free.

      Indonesia is in fact the #1 producer of both rattan and Dragon's Blood incense, and the #2 producer of natural rubber.