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Sorry, dude. As someone who was born and raised in the Amazon forest myself I can assure you having a sustainable mahogany supply for everybody wanting some does not compute. It takes ages for it to be mature and seconds to become beams. Also, logging is the major reason why trees fall in the Amazon, but not the only one why they won't grow back. Most if not all the devasted areas become permanent soy plantation where raising livestock is morally bad and there is monitoring, so I think you vegetarian reason is a bit romantic. Reducing consumism detain deforastation, nothing else does. If everyone could see with their own eyes godzillions of square meters of charred trees and burned dead animals maybe I would get more optimistic, but deforastation is a problem too afar and too deep in the jungle, denial is closer to the heart.

It's not clear to me at all that the kind of trees desirable for commercial wood plantations are the same you needed to offset the environmental and biodiversity effects of the current deforestation - especially if the trees of your "reforestation" are not planned to get older than 40 years.

I don't know much about rainforests, but central-european commercial forests have significantly less biodiversity than "wild" forests.

In short, I don't think the problem of deforestation is that we won't have enough wood anymore.

Those European commercial forests are cut at a younger age than these tropical plantations, as these plantations are growing far denser wood than European sycamore, beech, and alder wood.

Usually any plantation grown wood will be certified by some organization, FSC or another. Red grandis, genuine mahogany, and teak are the usual suspects in this category. All woods popularly known for furniture making.

These all grow much slower than the forests you typically see in Maine/Oregon, which extends their biological impact. This also greatly raises their costs, which is where increased commercial usage would encourage more of this type of sustainable growth and harvesting.

> I'm running a Kickstarter for a wood product right now and so I've learned a thing or two about how to encourage reforestation.

I'm not sure that follows. What does selling a product that is made of mahogany have to do with reforestation?

It doesn't have anything to do with it. The OP is trying to subtly insert a pitch for his kickstarter campaign into hacker news and this was his angle. Ironically, I think this highlights the very problem behind the deforestation. So long as we are all consumed with trying to make money, at any cost, we will continue to destroy the planet. We need to think beyond the $, even as entrepreneurs and capitalists.

I'm not sure there are many people who are willing to make money at any cost. That sure isn't the case here on HN.

Trump, Tillerson, DeVos, Koch brothers, Goldman Sachs, and on and on. I think there are plenty of people willing to stretch moral and ethical boundaries in order to make more money.

Oh, just look frankly at what the company is really doing. Selling ads? What do more ads do? Sell more stuff (we don't need - if we did, it mostly wouldn't need ads). Does planet Earth need more manufactured stuff?

The point is, if your company is willing to make money at any cost (all do - shareholder responsibility), and you are work for it, you are a part of the problem.

That's an unfair reading of my comment. And as others have mentioned below, I'm invested in thinking about how to sustainably grow wood because I'm commercially invested.

I don't know about cows and turkeys. If vat-grown meat becomes cheaper than field grown meat then I expect the food chain companies will switch production en-masse and while its likely that some will remain, they would be minority products and possibly different (some of the animals grown these days have been bred for such specific extreme traits that basically they are not suitable for wild living)

  https://gizmodo.com/the-future-will-be-full-of-lab-grown-meat-1720874704

This is however not perfect. There are lots of basically subsitence farmers in the Amazon, who do admittedly partake in destructive practises such as slash and burn to create pasturing land for cattle.

They do manage to eek out an existence and support their families from this. Allowing vat-grown meat to flood the Amazon countries with cheap meat will destroy their livelihoods and result in even more people living in extreme poverty where there is not any state protection nets.

The end result is basically capital moving from poor countries to rich countries which have the patents and production capability.

A bit off topic but I love seeing projects like yours succeed because it shows that people will pay real money for what is essentially an art project. Long live art.

Thank you, that's very kind of you to say. I have a bit of a history with art projects, in fact. Among other projects, I built and blogged a big interactive biofeedback art piece at Burning Man 2014 called Pulse & Bloom that hit HN a couple years ago: http://www.ofbrooklyn.com/2014/09/6/building-pulse-bloom-bio...

I really don't like reading people's advertisements in HN comments, but according to my reading of the site guidelines, there are no prohibitions against spam or other aggressive marketing within comments :/

People who work with the industry know more about the industry. My comment relies on my experience.

Your comment consisted largely of talking about and linking to your kickstarter. There was no way in which that was necessary to share your understanding or views about the topic.

What management practices do your "responsible growers" follow?

In the US commercial forest operators will cut anything there is a market for, sending stuff that isn't sawmill quality to a pulp mill or biomass plant. They want to get rid of stuff that isn't sawmill quality because it competes for resources.

Do you plan to make some in fancy metals too? Or other materials, like ivory for example (jk :p).

> Cats, cows, turkeys, dogs, and horses, among many other animals, will always be around as long as humans are, simply because we'll ensure that they always have a healthy habitat. The same goes for trees, especially tropical trees.

historical counter example: easter island

> as long as humans are

NO humans in easter island anymore.

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Island

> Population: 6,600

No, Easter island wouldn't have had taro, chickens, goats, pigs WITHOUT the polynesian humans bringing them.

The point is there was an ecological collapse (Collapse by Jared Diamond catalogues this well)

I'll probably be downvoted but I think it's in bad taste to use this kind of (bad) news as another way to market your product. I'll surely won't be buying your product nor recommending it. /rant

What you've said about making economics drive reforestation is true, but that's like saying that to end hunger you just have to give people food.

So you suggest planting trees that take 40 years to grow when the people doing the deflorestation are doing it because of profits that they'd never get via that method. (Economics)

It's the same with the plague that is eucalyptus, you know what drove its plantation and override of all other natural trees and plants in many places of the world? Economics! So you see that just economics might not be a very good way to solve the problem at hand.

So what do you propose to make the economics work? Highly tax meat? Or other products that are indirectly causing deflorestation?

I simply have experience in the subject because I've spent the last three years researching ways to make woodworking more sustainable. And driving up demand will in turn drive up supply, and as I explained above increased supply does indeed increase forests, as they have to be sustainably managed to come into the U.S. due to import restrictions.

Where did you end up sourcing your mahogany?

I believe Fiji currently has the world's largest mature mahogany plantation.

> driving up demand will in turn drive up supply [and] increase forests

I'm not sure this follows. Increasing the demand will merely incentivize deforestation at an increasing rate. If you start putting controls on it, the black market will just work around it just like with exotic parts from animals like horns. Let's assume you yourself are a woodcutter who believes in sustainability. The problem is that everyone else will just be thinking about short-term profits, especially when demand is so high. (see: the tragedy of the commons) If trees could be grown fast in farms like other animals or artificially like diamonds, you might have a point, but trees take so long to grow and if the demand is high, it will only encourage fast growing and killing of trees. You mention that optimizing for quality requires longer growth, and that assumes that quality wood is in demand which would also fetch higher prices, but that's debatable around the type of tree and its use. (you yourself say you have a market that require an "artisan" type of wood, but the majority of the world will be happy with whatever wood it can get, especially considering we use mixes in stuff like paper) Due to the limiting factor (time), demand will outdrive supply.

Seems a perfectly reasonable thing to do. The point is that he's more invested in wood because he uses wood for the product he makes. A link to the product shows he's not just making it all up.

I think it' bad taste to down vote a potentially world helping service.

And what do you do to make money that is helping us?

> So you suggest planting trees that take 40 years to grow when the people doing the deflorestation are doing it because of profits that they'd never get via that method. (Economics)

You can sell shares of the farm now, and pay out dividends as the wood comes to age. I invested in a brand new teak plantation in costa rica in the early 90s, and am making a continual stream of money from that since about 6 years ago.

That’s rather unfair. We should be able to distinguish between someone cynically exploiting a bad situation to enrich themselves, vs someone who is earnestly trying to offer a product that will be useful to its customers but that also has positive externalities.

We can debate the merits of a given approach, but we can be civil and charitable about it, and be appreciative when someone seems sincere about trying to do the right thing.

Nice project, but next time fire the video director: you can't let an actor do yoga in jeans :D

Hah, that was my decision last minute. We had anticipated a fitness section outside but I forgot to prep the actors with the right clothes. Then it rained and we had a ridiculous scene that thankfully only took a small part of the shoot.

Yeah, just jk, nice video

> This is also one of the reasons why I'm a vegetarian, as much deforestation is caused by burning forests for raising livestock.

Do you have any evidence that shows direct causation here?

It's pretty well-documented that ranchers literally burn down rainforests in Brazil to make room for livestock.

http://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/amazon/land-use/cattle-ran...

"The cattle sector of the Brazilian Amazon, incentivized by the international beef and leather trades,[2] has been responsible for about 80% of all deforestation in the region,[3] or about 14% of the world's total annual deforestation, making it the world's largest single driver of deforestation.[4] By 1995, 70% of formerly forested land in the Amazon, and 91% of land deforested since 1970, had been converted to cattle ranching.[5][6] Much of the remaining deforestation within the Amazon has resulted from farmers clearing land for small-scale subsistence agriculture[7] or mechanized cropland producing soy, palm, and other crops.[8]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...