I've noticed a couple diaries about the raids on the Gibson guitar company lately, and, while I don't often create diaries or comment on Daily Kos, I read it often, and I just couldn't let this pass without adding some real facts to the story.
I am a semi-professional luthier, i.e. a maker of stringed instruments, and this story affects me personally. I use some of the materials in question, I have professional relationships with some of the people involved (in a six-degreesl kind of way). I have also been following what other people in the industry are saying about it. So here are some more details on what's going on.
First, I am not going to defend Gibson's CEO. Making this into a case of political martyrdom is not doing anyone any good. By all accounts, he's another hysterical wingnut.
According to to people in the know, the object of the first raid on Gibson (in 2009) was in response to suspicion a shipment of malagasy ebony, which comes from Madagascar. There are about 150 species of ebony in the world (persimmon is actually a kind of ebony) but only about 20 of those species are useful for building musical instruments. The particular kind from Madagascar is particularly dense, and very uniformly black. This makes it very much prized for the fingerboards of stringed instruments.
I have been to Madagascar. Once, it was mostly covered with incredible rain forests. Since human habitation began, about 500 AD or so, these have been shrinking steadily, until now there is almost nothing left. It's shocking and heartbreaking to see mile after mile of red-dirt scrubland, with nothing growing on it except eucalyptus and sisal. Once-forested slopes are now cut with red gashes where landslides have devastated them. All of the once-clear rivers now look like potters' slip, they are so choked with the poor red clay. People eke out subsistence on skinny cows and dry rice cultivation.
Madagascar was a corrupt dictatorship for decades. Their longtime strong-man was overthrown in 2002, and since then the country has not had a stable government. There is a massive international conservationist presence in the country, but there is little their either they or the government can do to stop illegal logging.
But not all logging is prohibited in Madagascar. It is perfectly legal, under U.S. law to import wood from Madagascar, as long as it wasn't illegally cut under Madagascar law. This rule falls under the Lacey Act, which is at the heart of the matter. More on that in a moment.
Is it ethical to use wood from Madagascar? I don't think so, but that's my personal choice. Certainly, if we guitar makers were all to stop using any Madagascar woods for building, this would not have any impact on the deforestation. Illegal logging in Madagascar is carried out by local people whose children are starving. If they can get 1,000 for a log, which will end up in high-end guitars, they'll take it. However, if no one will buy that log for $1000 for guitars, they will happily sell the same log to someone else for $100. Failing that, they'll just make charcoal out of it.
Yep, imagine that. $100 a board foot ebony being turned into charcoal. It happens.
THe only real solution is to get local people to stop cutting down their own forests and give them some other ways to make money. Tourism helps (I know, I've been there) but it's not a cure-all.
You may ask, why not just substitute? Some makers do. A few kinds of wood are suitable for guitar making, but not very many. Fingerboards in particular need to be made from very dense, heavy wood or they just sound like crap.
But Gibson's crusade is about the Lacey Act (pdf here for the details). In a nutshell, it holds manufacturers liable if any of the materials in their products were illegally obtained. Sounds great on the surface, and I certainly agree with the spirit of it, but it's damned near impossible to enforce, and impossible to comply with. For example, if I buy a piece of wood from LMI and make a guitar with it, and want to export it, I need to somehow prove that the piece of wood was legally obtained. I can point back to LMI, but LMI may not be able to prove it either. The legality of my product is only as good as the legality of every other person in the chain-- and sometimes that's a very long chain. It's impossible for me to verify every link in that chain-- no one can-- and yet I am legally on the hook for it.
In this sense, Gibson has a point. But, we should point out, other guitar makers (Martin, for example) manage to navigate the Lacey Act well enough, and have people on the ground in their procurement process to ensure they are in the clear.
In this first case in 2009, it seems like Gibson just got caught in blatant violation of the act, with the wood equivalent of banned ivory. In this new case, it's a different story.
In this luthier's forum thread, it's explained (several pages in) that the new raid is over East Indian Rosewood fingerboards. Unlike malagasy ebony, East Indian Rosewood is not in short supply. It's grown on tea plantations to provide shade for the tea plants.
The Indian government has a law prohibiting the export of raw rosewood. Not because it's rare, but because the Indian government wants to create sawmill jobs. So the stipulation is that only "finished" wood products may be exported, not just lumber. However, the Indian government considers a rosewood fingerboard blank, which is really just a piece of wood about 24" x 3" x 5/16", to be a "finished" product for legal purposes.
The trouble with Gibson started when someone at Luthiers Mercantile International filled out the paperword wrong-- a simple clerical error. The inspectors, not being luthiers, saw a stack of "raw" wood boards, rather than "fingerboard blanks." So now here we go again.
In this case the Lacey Act is being used to enforce India's industrial protectionism, rather than environmental laws. The wood in question this time isn't even illegal under the Lacey Act, it's just suspected of being illegal because someone made a paperwork mistake.
There are some allegations that the government trumped up this latest raid to just poke around for more evidence to use in their first action two years ago. Which is the sort of thing I'd do if I were them. I don't have a lot of sympathy for Gibson, but the problem they face is a very real one.
Bottom line here: Gibson's CEO is a wingnut jackass, but the real situation with the Lacey Act is pretty complicated, and the law itself needs some serious reform to achieve its laudable aims while allowing environmentally conscious businesspeople to keep operating.