Let the Land be Unplowed in the Seventh Year...

After writing a bit about frankincense yesterday, I see this today:

Science Daily
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/12/061212213543.htm

Frankincense Trees Overexploited For Christmas Scent

ScienceDaily (Dec. 13, 2006) — Current rates of tapping frankincense - which according to the Bible was given to the baby Jesus by the three wise men at Christmas and which will feature in thousands of Nativity plays in coming days - are endangering the fragrant resin's sustained production, ecologists have warned. Writing in the December issue of Journal of Applied Ecology, ecologists from the Netherlands and Eritrea say that over tapping the trees results in them producing fewer, less viable seeds...

the way that frankincense is tapped needs to be changed. "In order to control the decline in fruit and seed production, less intensive tapping procedures should be developed. As our results show that six tapping points per tree are already having a negative impact, we suggest reducing the number of tapping points. New tapping regimes should include rest periods when there is no resin harvesting to allow the trees to recover," they say. ..

Since the time of Solomon frankincense has been grown and harvested.
When did the local farmers forget how to do it?
When and why did people who have been doing something successfully for over 2,000 years forget the basics of agriculture and husbandry?


Money and Profit, pure and simple. The Frankincense industry is a microcosm for our world economy and the things which infect it with its own destructive toxins. Frankincense is being over-harvested because the farmers or the governments have forgotten that trees are not industrial robots, and that husbandry demands that living things have "off-season" time to recuperate...
There are Powers in the world of life that are beyond the Power of Money. We ignore these powers at our own risk.

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