If you have spent any time in this corner of the internet you will have read that palo santo is endangered, that buying it is irresponsible, and that the decent thing is to burn something else. The claim is everywhere. It is also, as usually stated, wrong — and it is wrong in a specific, correctable way that is worth understanding, because the same confusion turns up in shop listings, including ones we have had to correct.
Two trees, one name
The wood sold as palo santo for burning is Bursera graveolens, a tree of the dry forests of Ecuador and Peru, related to frankincense and myrrh. The IUCN assessed it in 2019 and classed it as Least Concern. It is not listed on any CITES appendix, which means its international trade is not restricted.
The endangered tree is Bulnesia sarmientoi, from the Gran Chaco of Paraguay, Argentina and Bolivia. It is also called palo santo. It is on the IUCN Red List as Endangered and on CITES Appendix II, and it is logged for timber and for an essential oil used in perfumery. It is a different genus, a different family, a different continent's worth of ecology, and it is not what anybody is burning in a British sitting room.
The two trees have been collapsed into one in a thousand blog posts, and the panic transferred from the endangered one to the common one.
Where the rest of the confusion comes from
In 2006 the Peruvian government listed Bursera graveolens domestically as being in critical danger. Read out of context, that sounds like a global verdict. It was not. It was a national protection measure, and its practical effect was to prohibit the cutting of living trees and to require that the wood be gathered only after the tree has died and lain on the forest floor.
That last part is the bit worth knowing, because it is also the bit that determines whether your particular purchase was a good one.
The question that actually matters
Not "is this species endangered" — it is not. The question is whether this specific wood was collected from naturally fallen trees, which is both the law in Peru and the reason the wood smells the way it does. The aromatic compounds develop as the fallen heartwood cures over several years. Wood cut from a living tree does not smell as good. The commercial incentive and the conservation incentive point the same way, which is a rarer alignment than you might expect.
So ask sellers where the wood comes from and whether it is fallen-harvested. A seller who cannot answer is a seller who did not ask.
And white sage, which is the harder case
White sage — Salvia apiana — has the opposite profile. It is not endangered as a species either, but the pressure on it is real and local: wild stands in southern California have been stripped by commercial harvesters, sometimes illegally on public land, to supply a market that grew far faster than the plant does.
There is also a question that has nothing to do with botany. Smudging is a specific ceremonial practice belonging to particular Indigenous North American nations, with its own protocols. Using the word for "waving smoke around a room" flattens something that people are still fighting to practise; several of those nations have asked, publicly and repeatedly, that the word and the practice not be borrowed. You can burn a herb to change the feel of a room without calling it a smudge, and the smoke works exactly as well.
What we do about it
We sell palo santo and we describe it as first-grade wood from Peru, because that is what our supplier's documentation says. We do not carry white sage. That is not a moral position we are asking you to adopt — it is a decision we made about a supply chain we could not verify to our own satisfaction, and you are entitled to weigh it differently.
Sources for the above: the IUCN Red List assessments for both species, and the CITES appendices, both of which are public and searchable.