There is a great scene at the end of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian.  A group of people are being put to death in a way only Monty Python can pull off.  A Roman Centurion approaches the group with an edict saying to release Brian.  Of course the Centurion has no idea which one of the condemned is Brian, so he simply yells out that he is there to release Brian, so if Brian would make himself known, they could get on with it.  Brian of course yells out “I’m Brian,” and the guy next to him catches on quite quickly and also yells out “I’m Brain!” and soon the whole group is yelling “No, I’m Brian” ending with a husband next to his wife yelling “I’m Brian and so’s my wife.”  Of course the real Brian doesn’t get let go – instead the guy next to him who yelled louder gets released and goes on his merry way.

The reason I bring this up is not just to reference my undying fan-ship of those movies, but it reminded me of the environmental movement in the furniture business, specifically regarding wood.  We started importing furniture around 7 years ago, specifically made out of reclaimed wood.  When I first started, there was literally only one person that I could find in Northern Thailand that was making things out of reclaimed wood – he was way ahead of the curve in this way.  Everyone else looked at me like I was nuts.  I could almost hear what they were thinking:  why would you go through the hassle of hauling out moss covered trees on the ground or dredging them out of rivers when you sould go into the forest and cut down a nice shiny new one?  Then, years later as the environmental movement started to take hold in the furniture business and buyers like myself were more and more asking for reclaimed or salvaged wood, suddenly everyone in Thailand and south east Asia was saying they only used reclaimed wood.  The “I’m Brian” of the lumber business.  It was easy to do.  None of the buyers went into the field with the suppliers to see where they were getting their wood from and those furniture and lumber suppliers knew it.  On the buyer’s end of things, as long as they got the answer they were looking for “yes we use reclaimed wood” that was typically the end of the investigation.  But while so many furniture and lumber suppliers around the world were telling their buyers that they use reclaimed wood, in the mean time, lumber trucks are coming more and more over the border from Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia into Thailand, rainforest in Papua New Guinea is disappearing acres a day (by the way, this is the traditional depressing environmental statistics part of a discussion like this, but stay strong, there is a sort of happy ending  "something you can do" part as well),  Madagascar is loosing rosewood trees by the container loads coming out of covert lumber camps, the new version of blood diamonds in Africa is now refered to as "blood wood" and the Amazon is shrinking around four football fields every ten or so minutes and it's illegal logging that literally creates the inroads for this deforestation. 

The good news is there are a lot of really good suppliers around the world that really are trying to source genuine reclaimed wood, that are trying to set up diverse forestry plantations that are truly concerned about changing the industry and their local environment.  There are also a lot of domestic suppliers, right here in the old U S of A that come up with some pretty fantastic wood from renewable and reclaimed resources.  There are a lot of good buyers that are really trying hard to source genuinely reclaimed products for their stores by asking the tricky questions to get the honest answers from their suppliers.  So it’s all out there, you just have to ask the right questions to find it.  Ask the person in the shop how they know that the table they are selling is made out of reclaimed wood.  If you are a retailer, ask your supplier how they can be sure that their sources aren’t cutting down forest or buying from lumber poachers.  In a way, it doesn’t matter if they have an answer right then and there.  It will make them think, and hopefully that will lead to action. Certification of every piece of wood in the world is clearly impossible, but  we may as well get it in supplier’s heads that just saying something is reclaimed isn’t enough.   In a way, the hand made rug business went through this.  Once the specter of child labor finally sunk into the end consumer’s head,  they started asking their sales person who made the rug they were about to buy and things started to change.  At first, some rug manufacturers quite easily started saying that of course they didn’t use child labor, knowing full well that no one was going to be able to disprove that, while other manufacturers made an honest effort to end the practice.  Then when certification systems came out, some manufacturers started putting fake labels on their rugs mimicking the real ones like Rug Mark.  But eventually after enough pressure from the end consumer, those charlatans started to fall away and child labor went into a steep decline in the business – through verifiable certification techniques that came about as a direct result of consumers asking the simple question of “how do you know who made this rug?”  The same thing could happen in the furniture business just by simply asking "how do you know it's reclaimed?"  Then maybe we can get to a point where everyone yelling “I’m Brian” really is, even that guy and his wife.