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Gibson Salutes Earth Day: Our Commitment to Sustainable Tonewoods

Gibson Salutes Earth Day:
Our Commitment to Sustainable Tonewoods
Dave Hunter | 04.22.2008

Guitarists’ hearts beat with the round, resonant thump of fine tonewood.
The sounds of our dreams emanate from warm mahogany, snappy maple,
throaty rosewood, silky ebony. Without carefully controlled and managed
foresting, however, and consideration from the manufacturers who use
them—guitar makers included—some of these noble woods could vanish
forever. Rather than acquire and horde all it can and crank it out on high-
priced instruments until supplies simply dry up, Gibson is determined to do
something about it. Great traditional tonewoods can be raised and harvested
in a sustainable, earth-friendly way, and exciting new alternative tonewoods
can be found to complement them. And when a leading guitar maker like
Gibson puts its weight behind both ventures it’s a win-win situation for
players and the earth alike.

Gibson’s promotion of sustainable wood sources makes its way to the guitar
market in a range of guises, some obvious, some less so, but always with a
maximum effort to source wood from Rainforest Alliance Certified supplies*,
and never from endangered or illegal wood stocks (as determined by the
CITES list, drawn up by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered
Species). Gibson first introduced a SmartWood Les Paul Standard back in
1996, then upped the ante in 1998 with a six-pack of Les Paul Exotics,
made with carved tops of certified Paraguayan curupay, taperyva,
cancharana, peroba, banara, and ambay guasa, backs of certified mahogany,
and fingerboards of curupay. Currently, the Les Paul SmartWood Studio is
a proud and prominent declaration of the beauty and viability of alternative
tonewoods. Made from an ever-changing supply of exotic tonewoods,
the model currently features gorgeous Central American muira piranga.

Less obvious than the up-front promotion of alternative tonewoods is,
according to a Gibson corporate mandate, the use of as much traditional
tonewood from certified sources as can be acquired. Managed forests in
North America, primarily in the northeast, are yielding sustainable sources
of maple that is perhaps of better quality than ever before, while the
most-used Gibson tonewood, mahogany, comes primarily from certified
forests in Honduras and Guatemala, where trees are harvested on an
18 to 20-year cutting cycle with strict regulations regarding size restrictions
and sustainable forestry.Since 2005, for example, Gibson has been buying
large shipments of mahogany from foresters in the Río Plátano Biosphere
Reserve in Honduras. The mahogany is extracted from this protected area
with minimal impact on the natural forest, and Gibson’s relationship with
the reserve foresters not only helps to ensure the availability of these great
woods in the future, but makes a significant economic contribution to this
impoverished region of Central America.