By Glenn Rifkin

Wednesday, June 6, 2007
ACTON, Massachusetts: Christian Martin IV is a member of the sixth generation to run his family's renowned guitar-making business, C.F. Martin & Co.

But he is surely the first to worry about the shrinking availability of the distinctive woods used to build Martin guitars, the choice of artists like Sting, Jimmy Buffett and John Mayer.

As old-growth forests have been razed and tropical species like mahogany, ebony and rosewood have become endangered, guitar makers like Martin, Taylor, Fender and Gibson have had to rethink the notion of an inexhaustible supply of the desired woods to make their instruments. As small privately held companies, these instrument makers have banded together to join the burgeoning corporate social responsibility movement, partly to ensure their long-term survival.

"If I use up all the good wood, I'm out of business," Martin said. "I have a two-year-old daughter, Claire Frances Martin, and she can be the seventh generation C.F. Martin. I want her to be able to get materials she'll need just as my ancestors and I have over the past 174 years."

Though they are fierce competitors for a small but vibrant marketplace, the companies are aware of the significant changes in the availability and price of the most desired woods. In an unusual alliance, the four guitar makers have joined with Greenpeace in one of many efforts to bring attention to the issue of forest management and sustainability.

Bob Taylor, president and co-founder of Taylor Guitars in El Cajon, California, says he has seen one vital wood species after another become unavailable in the 35 years he has been in business.

"I used to buy Brazilian rosewood back in the 1970s at the lumber yard for $2 a square foot," Taylor said. "Now it's impossible for us to make a guitar out of it and ship it outside the U.S. If we do get a little bit of it, it's extremely expensive. The cutting of it has all but halted. Adirondack spruce is unavailable. Mahogany was so plentiful it was a commodity. Now only specialty cutters are getting it and the prices have gone through the roof. All these things happened just in my lifetime."

Greenpeace spearheaded the Musicwood Coalition, as it is called, in January 2006, to promote better logging practices, particularly in the rain forest region in southeast Alaska. Because of its unique geography, a thin strip of land in the Alaska panhandle with the ocean on one side, huge mountains on the other, this temperate forest is considered one of the rarest on the planet.

Its majestic trees - Sitka spruce that are hundreds of years old - have been clear cut by private timber companies and Greenpeace has worked to encourage these landowners to rethink the business model to preserve what is left of the ancient forests.

Specifically, Greenpeace wants the private logging firms to apply for certification by the Forest Stewardship Council, an environmental organization which would require the adoption of logging practices that would safeguard these endangered forests. Scott Paul, the Forest Campaign Coordinator for Greenpeace, said that if the current logging practices continued unabated, the last old-growth Sitka spruces would be gone in six or seven years.

"This scared the hell out" of the guitar makers, Paul said. For them, the Sitka spruce is a precious commodity, a tonal wood used for the soundboards in acoustic guitars and pianos to achieve the sound that guitarists cherish.

Paul points out that the amount of Sitka spruce used by guitar makers is a tiny fraction of the total shipped. As few as 150 logs are enough to supply the whole industry each year. Nearly 80 percent of the spruce cut in Alaska is shipped to Asia, primarily Japan, for home building. "These 400-year old trees are getting buried in the walls of homes in Japan," Paul said.

Paul approached Henry Juszkiewicz, the chief executive of Gibson Guitar, who had been environmentally active for many years. Juszkiewicz was an early supporter of the Rain Forest Alliance on whose board he sits and helped start the SmartWood program which audits the illegal poaching of endangered wood species. He rallied his competitors to join the Greenpeace effort.

Though the market for guitars is relatively small - Martin estimates that three million acoustic and electric guitars are sold in the United States each year - it is a growing market, especially among serious amateurs willing to pay thousands of dollars for a top-quality instrument. The guitar makers are looking for alternative woods that are more plentiful and cheaper, but everyone agrees that buyers who spend big bucks for an instrument are looking for a distinctive sound as well as the characteristic look and feel of traditional woods.

Rock stars like Sting and Dave Matthews, among others, are lending their names to the effort. Orianthi, a 22-year- old Australian protégé of Carlos Santana, bought a new $3,000 Martin made of red birch and cherry, both sustainable woods. "Guitars made from alternative woods generally don't sound very good," she said, "but when I started playing this one, it sounded amazing, as good as the traditional instruments."

For the dealers, however, the buyers of high-end guitars continues to crave Brazilian rosewood and mahogany. "People are looking for investment-grade guitars," Joe Caruso, co-owner of the Music Emporium in Lexington, Massachusetts, said. "I've got guitars for $25,000 and that upper tier market has really blossomed over the last 10 years."

Still, as Martin out it, "None of us want to cut the last tree," he said.