The idea for this instrumental artwork came to me while I was insuring that any upcycled wood I was using for my guitar necks in my artworks had to have come from a reputable supplier.
It was a simple thing to check the provenance of the wood I had sourced from demolition sites, but some of the wood I was going to use had to come from overseas, so I wanted to make sure it was legally logged using an environmentally sound method.
When I was travelling the northern jungles in Sumatra in the early 90s’ I noticed there was a lot of illegal logging and slash and burn techniques going on to extract the native timbers that grew in the jungle. There was always a smell of burning forest and black smoke in the air, with numerous illegal logging camps scattered around the jungle.
The illegally chopped wood was then smuggled to China, stamped and certified as legally cut wood from a sustainable Forrest somewhere in China. Once this wood was shipped to foreign countries it was nearly impossible to determine its authenticity.
The damage done to the Forests in Sumatra was devastating, displaced and dead wildlife and burnt ground was all that was left when the illegal loggers moved through the forest.
Forests take hundreds of years to mature and in one decade nearly all the jungles in Sumatra bore the scars of illegal logging. This practice is still going on all around the world, including the precious Amazon jungle Where you can see John Deere machinery plants lining the illegal logging roads into the jungle, selling heavy logging equipment with impunity to the illegal loggers.
Greed will cut down every tree on this planet while it remains the number one priority in mans mind. There are ways to cultivate and sustain all the forests in the world if we adhere to a global standard of safe practice with the welfare of the forest as the main priority.
