Forest-Friendly Musical Instruments

For many years now the Forest Stewardship Council has been the world standard for ensuring that paper products have come from sustainably harvested forests.  But as a recent incident in Vancouver's Burnaby Mountain exposes, there's demand for unsustainably- or illegally-logged forests for products outside of what we write and draw on.

Tree poachers have been illegally slashing and cutting down trees in the Vancouver-area conservation area looking for wood to be used to make guitars and other high-end musical instruments.  It seems as if that a certain type of maple tree with a specific type of compression marks in its tree rings can fetch up to $200 per 1/2 ft x 2 ft block, dozens of which can be extracted from a single tree.  With traditionally highly desirable woods like (rainforest) mahagony protected by international treaties, a thriving black market of illegally- and unsustainably-harvested wood is out there.

Greenpeace USA's MusicWood program was built specifically to educate the public and musicians - ironically some of the world's most socially- and environmentally-conscious people - about the sourcing of musical instruments.  Gibson, Modulus, Martin and Dave Maize are among the guitar manufacturers that use forest-friendly wood in their instruments and Martin recently released an acoustic guitar made of 100% FSC-Certified wood.

(photo CC license by Matt McGee)