Vanishing Cultural Landscapes: White Sage, Indigenous Knowledge, and Conservation Across Borders

Vanishing Cultural Landscapes: White Sage, Indigenous Knowledge, and Conservation Across Borders, Isabel Garibay Toussaint, Sula Vanderplank, Nubia Cortes, Rose Ramirez and Nemer E. Narchi's 2026 peer reviewed article in the Journal of Ethnobiology, confirmed against the journal's own listing, is a six month collaborative ethnography, 2021 to 2022, with the Kumeyaay village of San Jose de la Zorra, documenting how increasing commercial demand for white sage has intensified extraction, degraded habitat and eroded Indigenous Californian borderlands ecological knowledge and access. Its strength is that it is squarely the fact's commercial appropriation and overharvesting claim, drawn from sustained collaborative fieldwork with the community itself. Its limit is that it is a single case study of one Kumeyaay village; broader claims about white sage commercialization across other communities need their own sourcing.