Wood Ethics

One of my favorite lines from a 20th-century philosopher is this one: “There is no way out of entanglement.” It’s not a good line because it’s inspiring (it isn’t), but because it’s true in the sense that it faces head-on the excruciating complexities of our contemporary situation. It has a fairly adequate summation in the pop-culture arena, somewhat predictably from the TV show “The Good Place.” The setting for the scene is an augmented reality IHOP. In actual reality, they’re in “the bad place” debating the heaven or hell scoring system. Speaking to “The Judge” (Maya Rudolph), who determines who goes where (heaven or hell), Michael (Ted Danson) tells her, “It’s impossible to be good enough to go to the good place.” The point system has been broken, he says, by the system itself. “Just buying a tomato at a grocery store unwittingly means that you are supporting toxic pesticides, exploiting labor, contributing to global warming.” He continues: “Humans think they’re making one choice, but they don’t even know they’re making dozens of choices they don’t even know they’re making.”

Faith and I go round and round on this very same dilemma in mundane, kitchen-table ways all the time. Which is better, farm-raised or wild-caught tuna? The latter leads to overfishing; the former feels exploitative. To be a wannabe responsible citizen of the world these days is to find yourself mired in routine dilemmas of this sort. Recycle? Of course. Do they actually do it, whoever “they” are? Who knows. Is the moral mandate to recycle some fictitious ethical facade for those who want to think they’re living the right way, a green-light for non-stop consumption because the truck picks it up once a week, and then, so we think, we hope, all that aluminum and plastic and cardboard is taken off to a miracle factory somewhere that churns out West Elm sofas made from recycled materials?

There is a faction in the woodworking world that sees woodworking, half-ironically, as a way to save the trees. The logic goes like this: Better to transform fallen trees into durable, useful, meaningful goods, furniture, and the like, than to let them go to waste. I’m personally averse to the rhetoric of saving and survival. For me, it conjures Elon Musk’s desire to live on Mars to escape the troublesomeness of dealing with the rest of us and the limitations of a finite planet with all of its irritating resource limitations. That’s not survival, it’s the escape of the elite, the rest of us be damned. One Robert Zubrin wrote the bible-like blueprint for the Musk fantasy in the mid-1990s, The Case for Mars. Read it. It’s full of racist “Decline of Western Civilization” lamenting and nostalgic frontier mythology. Zubrin’s solution? Colonize Mars.

Here, where trees matter more to our survival than artificial bubbles and underground, radiation-proof bunkers, things are more complicated and messy. On Earth, there is no way out of entanglement.

Complicated and messy are accurate ways to describe efforts to track and document the sourcing of endangered and at-risk tree species. On paper, Western countries are decently diligent about this stuff, mostly because they can afford to be, and today’s anti-environmental proponents are so far too unaware of this corner of the movement to set up roadblocks, yet. In the U.S., the U.K., Western Europe, and Australia, most hardwood and softwood lumber is locally sourced and well-regulated. American softwoods like pine and fir come from California, the largest producer by far, and from Southern states, especially in the Mississippi Delta and the Appalachian Mountains. With that said, the Delta was once home to 600-year-old bottomland hardwood Cypress trees, which are now largely gone due to deforestation for industrial agriculture. Land that isn’t farmed for corn, soybeans, and catfish was turned into fast-growing softwood pine tree plantations that source construction-grade lumber. What happened there in the early 20th century isn’t any different from what still happens today throughout the global South. Indigenous people are displaced by deforestation for farmland and tree plantations that fuel the economic growth of the global North, in operations typically funded by Northern capital.

The sourcing of U.S. hardwoods, which woodworkers crave, is less obviously harmful, here at least. American hard white maple is largely grown in the Great Lakes region, including Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (the second-largest source of American-grown timber after California), and across the Northeastern states (Vermont, upstate New York, and New Hampshire). Walnut trees, as you might expect, are a midwestern staple, mostly coming to your local lumberyard from Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Iowa, Kansas, and West Virginia. Cherry is Appalachian, think West Virginia and southern Pennsylvania. Lumber from these regions is regulated and often certified, adhering to standards and strategies set by organizations like the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), which began in the 1990s as a greenwashing watchdog agency and is the Fair Trade equivalent for wood and wood products. The FSC certifies a ton of consumer stuff, from paper bags and bottle corks to the classic wood-and-metal mouse traps I recently bought because Faith saw a mouse in the house.

But it cannot be assumed that popular hardwoods like maple and cherry are overall fine just because they’re not considered globally endangered, unlike some of the rarer and more exotic woods. This is the problem I have with the two most often cited references for wood species risk: the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which publishes the Red List of Threatened Species. It’s messier and more complicated than they make it seem because the metric they use, species endangerment, tells only part of the story.

There are maple species worldwide; for instance, while American and European maples may be fine due to regulated growth and replacement strategies, they’re not fine in eastern Europe and Russia, where deforestation is rampant. And it’s hard to tell, despite the heroic efforts of scientists and watchdog agencies, when cheaper, endangered maple is bundled with and buried beneath other goods from those regions and entering U.S. markets. This is one area where Europe is far ahead of the U.S.: they’re developing genetic databases to trace the origin of imported wood, we are not.

CITES and the IUCN usually only flag the really exotic and tropical endangered species that get used to turn on a lathe to make fancy pens and whatnot, and for musical instruments, an unrelentingly law-breaking industry. No price is too high for Art. A few U.S. woodworking faves are purpleheart, zebrawood, cocobolo, and wenge (pr. win-gay), sourced from Africa and the Amazon - obvious culprits because they’re endangered species. But I get a bigger bang for my conscience’s buck by keeping tabs on the World Wildlife Fund’s Wood Risk Tool because, in addition to endangerment, they factor in the following: there are some not-so-exotic woods that are sourced in century-old Mississippi Delta-type ways in Africa and the Amazon today, funded by secretive global North-money through shell companies and the like, carried out on the ground by economically desperate and deprived locals, distributed through shady supply chain tactics, all at the expense of indigenous peoples, biodiversity, and ecosystem sustainability. Mainstream endangerment trackers overlook them because the teak they supply, for example, isn’t globally endangered overall. But it is now endangered there, and it’s not just that the wood is locally endangered (even if not globally). The WWF prefers the term “illegal” over “endangered” to flag situations where, say, Brazil’s official rules on deforestation are ignored (especially under Bolsonaro, who turned a huge blind eye), because it brings in reams of concealed foreign investment in land (also illegal under Brazilian law) and punishes the peasants and indigenous resisters to so-called progress.

Messy and complicated, as I said. But the reason there’s no way out of entanglement is that I don’t actually know for sure where my hard white maple originated, and probably neither does my trusty local lumberyard, which purchased it from a distributor, whose supply chain may have been compromised in ways they have no clue about. Did it come from Belarus, with a 3.6 out of 10 score for non-corruption confidence on WWF’s Wood Risk Tool? No clue. No clue. I can never know whether I’m ahead or behind in the wood ethics game because the point system is broken by the system itself.

Even if you’re not a purchaser of hardwood or hardwood consumer products, most of the deforestation in places like Indonesia and Africa today is for the establishment of palm tree plantations. Do a quick Google search of all the different kinds of products containing palm oil to see whether you, too, are hopelessly entangled. You likely are, and so here we are, together stuck inside a moral dilemma not of our own making, from which it seems impossible to extricate ourselves. Unfortunately, for those of us who strive to be moral, there’s no clear-cut moral to this story. Except maybe that wood ethics are a stand-in, a placeholder for the intractable ethical dilemmas of this day and age.