Ukes and endangered woods.....shouldn't we care more?

rainbow21 said:

On the fence, here...

The photo is a fence that I replaced last year. It is redwood. Probably every fence in the neighborhood is redwood and most are replacement fences in the last ten years. In fact most fences in the Bay Area are probably redwood. I remember when as a child when we drove into Marin County, you would inevitably get stuck behind logging trucks. Pass one and a bit later, be behind another. Much of Northern California on the coast was centered around the logging industry.

Now how many ukuleles made of redwood will impact the environment?

Focus here is naturally on ukuleles, but if trying to save the environment, maybe attention should be directed elsewhere. Apparently Brazilian rosewood was a favorite wood of guitar makers, but it is not the reason for it becoming endangered. The CITES stuff for it was put in to restrict export to furniture makers in China.

In other threads, koa is not endangered. Trees/rainforests, etc. are being (clear) cut because of agriculture and development, not musical instruments. Want to save some trees? Maybe stop eating beef is a better solution.

So railing against buying more ukuleles (unintended consequence may be that many go out of business?) is not on my radar at all for helping the environment. Ukuleles are a net plus for the world in my scorebook... more is better.

(and BTW, the plants in the photo include many native plant species for the bugs and birds along with a lot of weeds)
View attachment 170602

Click to expand...

pepamahina said:

I've read a lot of talk here about woods of various kinds and which woods are better for what sound, and so on and so forth....but I can't find any discussion at all about wood choices in ukuleles and their environmental impact. Mahogany, for example, is a terrible choice in terms of the effect on world rainforests. When I was looking for my current uke I wrote to Kala asking them about where they source their woods and what they had to say about environmental impact, and they didn't even respond. I chose an acacia uke because I read a guide from rainforestrelief.org that said that acacia was a good alternative wood in its list of woods to avoid. You can see the pdf that I read here:
http://www.rainforestrelief.org/documents/Guidelines.pdf
I'd like to see more people talking about this issue here. So what do you think? Do environmental considerations ever enter in to the equation when you are choosing a ukIe?

Click to expand...