Raul’s Blog

I ran across a disclaimer from an online teak reseller last week. It got me thinking about teak and the tree farms it comes from. The disclaimer highlights some disadvantages of owning plantation-grown teak products. Keep in mind, this is marketing copy to entice you to buy Teak furniture!

All new teak wood will undergo a process where the natural oils of the wood rise to the surface. This process is natural and cannot be prevented. It allows dirt and residue to stick to the oil on the surface of the wood. The furniture should be cleaned by scrubbing the surface with a non-abrasive brush and using a solution of mild detergent and water. Rinse the furniture well and let it dry in the sun. All of the finishes that we offer require this general maintenance. Additional maintenance requirements for specific finishes … are described below.

Excerpted from: GO_CareAndMaintenance.pdf (PDF)

Teak is a good quality outdoor wood despite the maintenance issues mentioned above. Forever Redwood is not a fan of teak because of how the teak is grown. The teak tree farmers sing a green song and have the muscle to broadcast this message wide. But, I have visited teak tree farms in Central America. If you visited them, you’d see why we are not fans….

Teak has big companies behind it. Even Martha Stewart came out in May 2010 lauding Teak as her outdoor wood of choice. But, although it is “sustainable” and it does take pressure off the native forests somewhat, there are a few hidden “uglies” no one mentions.

The Teak industry does not mention what existed on most lands before they became tree farms. The reason is because these monoculture teak tree farms are growing where once biologically diverse forestlands existed.

Ouch. Once you understand this and verify it, the green credentials kind of have a large hole in them, don’t you think?  It matters little if the tree farm is sustainable, if it’s not natural or diverse and the tree species come from another continent.

To be fair to the tree farmers, some of the native forests were cleared decades ago and some a couple centuries back. But, in too many cases, recently cut native forestlands are also being converted to tree farms.

Yes, we at Forever Redwood are tree huggers. But, not just any fast growing non-native tree will do (Teak is native to Asia). The climate situation worldwide cries out for a restoration of the many tree species that are native to each area.

Native forests exist because they’ve adapted over thousands of years to the local conditions. They create habitat, replenish aquifers, and do hundreds of other beneficial things. Fast growing money crops that grow in straight lines are not adapted to local climates and will cause problems long-term, from soil imbalances to insect infestations, and they can not be adapted for local wildlife to use as habitat.

Don’t take my word for it. Look into it yourself. It’s green marketing, my friends.

Since most of us don’t have the time to look into things, if it looks green we take it on its word. Look closely and you’ll see the not so pretty truth.

Teak tree farms are profitable because they grow quickly on cheap lands with cheap labor. On the other hand, doing forestry right takes a lot of time and money. Here at Forever Redwood, we’ll keep restoring native forestlands instead and we very much appreciate your support.

Thank you for letting me rant a bit. It keeps me sane.

“Sustainable Forestry” is primarily green marketing. It’s unfortunate, it’s sad, but in my humble (and experienced) opinion, it’s truly the case.

In September, 2009, the New York Times ran an interesting article: Environmental Groups Spar Over Certifications of Wood and Paper Products that shows how and why this is true.

The original Smartwood standards created by the Institute for Sustainable Forestry in Redway, CA have been expanded and broken down into many new certification standards. You can visit the Rainforest Alliance site at www.rainforest-alliance.org to learn more.

It’s a great website and these guys sound green to the core. I am sure they are well intentioned and are committed to the cause. They have the paperwork, the website, the contracts and the legal and political muscle in place. But, the bottom line is in order to have grown to over 100 million acres under certification, even the best of these standards has in practice been watered down over the years to allow for larger and larger industrial concerns to sign on.

FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) has the best reputation in the industry and deservedly so. They have moved industrial forestry in the right direction a couple steps. But, it’s not enough. Nowhere near enough to reverse the degradation still going on all over the world or even to restore the lands under certification.

For example, to be certified “sustainable” by FSC does not mean forestlands have to be restored to large trees or that the great losses in biodiversity and wildlife habitat are being significantly restored. To the contrary, most certified forests only have to be maintained as working forests full of young trees in most cases. It’s better than no forests, but it’s not green in any real sense.  The examples are endless. I’ll just mention three points:

• The rates of cut are still too high to allow for mature trees to develop in any significant quantities.
• Many certified concerns still are allowed to use chemical herbicides.
• Large monoculture teak tree farms that replaced biologically diverse forestlands are certified as sustainable.

Saying this in public and without any qualifications may get me sued by some of these wealthy and large organizations. And, I may be forced to remove this blog entry at some point. But, it’s the sad truth.

If you have an interest in this subject and want to delve deeper, the NY Times article spells it out clearly. Here is a major newspaper, considered liberal by most standards, telling you in a not-so-indirect way that the certification standards for sustainably harvested forest products are bunk.

Buried in the article is the truth about “sustainable forestry.” The article focuses on the legal and political machinations amongst competing “green forestry” labels. It seems to lean in favor of the FSC standards as generally being considered stricter environmentally. But, if you read the article to its conclusion, Consumers Union, a third-party that verifies the validity of the claims of both “certification bodies,” gives them both poor to average marks for Forest Stewardship.

We need a new standard for truly green forestry. The standards written in Forever Redwood’s Restoration Forestry Manual cannot be manipulated politically because the main points are quantitative and verifiable. This is not the case with the existing standards in general use. If you severely limit the rate of cut in all time frames into the future, your forestry practices are constrained to always allow the forest to mature to large and ancient trees again. This is the heart of the matter and the one the existing certifications skirt.

To read about our forestry standards, please go to: classic.foreverredwood.com/restoration-forestry.php

Your comments are welcome.

Click image to read full article

This photo comes to us from Penny W. in Chico, California. Penny is the creative inspiration behind our beloved “Penny’s Lounger.” She suggested the design after visiting a resort in Mexico some years ago.

Starring in the photo is Penny’s dog, Camille, a 9-month old Red Standard Poodle. Reports Penny:

The pad is wonderful, as she will run around the yard — muddy feet — and jumps up on the lounger and sleeps for a couple of hours — sunbathing! Obviously, we redheads love to sunbathe! Every evening, I hose the pad off and VOILA!!! Once again it looks brand new — waiting for the next day. I haven’t even had time to spend on it.

Hmm… It sounds like we might need to rename it “Camille’s Lounger.”

Camille the Red Standard Poodle poses for the camera on a Penny's Lounger with Sunbrella Cushion

If you have a photo of your own adorable pet making use of your Forever Redwood furniture, please don’t hesitate to send it along!

Ed Homer, a filmmaker and supporter of restoration forestry, sent us a link to one of his recent videos:

The video shows a great example of the best of what the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has to offer. Most FSC-certified forests have lower standards than those of the gentlemen’s lands in the video. (Merve Wilkensen, the forester in the video, is one of the people I studied years ago. He is a pioneer in the field.) The 10% set aside for Old-Growth trees is fantastic. It’s not required by FSC, but this is the key to restoring and not just sustaining lands.

In fact, we’re meeting the same higher standards here at Old-Growth Again. The key is to cut at a very low rate that allows the forest to bring back the Old-Growth on its own over time. We also set aside 5 trees per acre to never be cut. Combining the very low cut rate and the set asides is the key to restoration forestry. Restoration forestry exceeds sustainable forestry standards because of the lower rates of cut set in perpetuity.

Thanks to Ed for the video link and keep up the good work!

We are always willing to do a custom new design. Custom designs, custom options & details and custom sizing are the secrets to our ever-expanding product selection. We don’t run a factory. We operate an old-fashioned wood working shop. Everything is made by hand and will always be done this way. This gives us the flexibility to say yes as often as possible. Sometimes we can’t get it done, but usually it leads to interesting new items we wind up adding to our website’s offerings.

If you have a design you’d like made, send it over. It will take a bit of time, but odds are we’ll come up with a beauty.

In this photo our in-house master carpenter Tony Toledo and I are working out ways of strengthening and refining the basic skeleton of an arched hammock stand design (next to us on the table).

This is the finished product, which we've named the Noah's Arc Hammock.

Robert Galusha is a good friend of Forever Redwood and is the designer behind some of our most successful products. Based in Kingman, Arizona, he offers fine furniture made to order. From reinterpretations of classic styles to the freshest of contemporary pieces, his award-winning work has appeared in many design publications including the cover of “Architectural Digest.” If you are interested in commissioning a unique accent piece or a whole room full of furniture, we highly recommend his services. You can learn more by visiting www.RobertGalusha.com.

Boxes of Redwood furniture ready to ship across the country... and even farther

Yes, you can have large wood furniture items shipped cross-country (or across the oceans) to your door without a glitch. We do it every day. Since 1995, Forever Redwood has shipped thousands of items of all sizes all over the US, Canada, and occasionally Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Our shipping partners (Fed Ex, UPS, YellowFreight and other LTL carriers) are fast and reliable. In the rare case something gets dinked, we remake replacement parts at no cost and ship within a week.

If you order Forever Redwood furniture, you will never receive boxes full of hundreds of parts to decipher. All small items ship fully assembled (that includes Planter Boxes up to 1′ W x 1′ H up to 8′ L, Swing Seats, Mini & Tiny Foot Stools, all the folding items, etc.). For larger items, we design to minimize re-assembly (ship many sections already assembled). For example, Dining Chairs usually ship in 4 to 6 parts—just enough to limit the size of the packaging and keep shipping costs down. Even many large items are less than 10 parts, for example, the 8 ft Patio Table ships in 8 parts.

If you’re curious how an item is re-assembled, download the PDF instructions for it at:
classic.foreverredwood.com/assembly.php

Small orders usually ship Fed Ex Ground. Large items (like picnic tables, swing sets or pergolas) ship in a crate with padded boxes strapped in it via LTL carriers like FedEx Freight or UPS Freight. Once your crate arrives at the distribution center near you, you’ll be called to set up a convenient time to deliver. Crates are dropped off on your driveway. Then, you can unscrew the crate and move the individual boxes easily (no box weighs over 90 lbs). We ship from San Diego, CA. If you live in CA, we can assemble your order for a small extra charge.

If you live in California, we can hand-deliver your furniture and even assemble it for you!

When your order ships, you’ll receive tracking information by email to know when its arriving. Standard orders ship in 4-6 weeks. We also ship to Canada, Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, and other countries. We’ve shipped our furniture to Italy, Japan, even Dubai.

To find more details about your shipping options, please visit:
classic.foreverredwood.com/shipping.php

Forever Redwood operates an old-fashioned woodworking shop. Every item is made by hand to the highest standards and can be customized to meet you spatial or creative needs. Old-fashioned hand-building is becoming a lost art. Even though we may be far away, consider us your personal woodworking shop. If it’s made of wood, odds are we can do it!

An article published this week in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat details a level headed approach to forestry. The details mentioned are a close reproduction of the practices Old-Growth Again uses to begin the restoration process of cut-over lands. It’s heartening to see this becoming more generally practiced and other restoration outfits popping up around the country.

I think once the national forests lands mentioned are restored, the forest service contracts eventually issued will in all likelihood cut at a faster rate than we are doing. Under Forest Stewardship Council guidelines mentioned, they will probably cut about 2% per year versus our 1% per year limit. This is the basic difference between Sustainable Forestry and Restoration Forestry. But, at least in the initial phase, they are both nearly identical since there is little timber that can be harvested and only the thinning, planting and soil management aspects can be addressed.

This aside, the article details a significant turning point in forest management in the Northwest.  It is hopefully the long-awaited shift in the political wars of the past 30 years that pitted ecology vs economy instead of ecology and economy as we’ve been struggling to demonstrate since 1994.

Here’s the intro to the article, with a link to read more….

(AP Photo/Jeff Barnard) In this May 15, 2009 photo, Lomakotsi Restoration Project crew supervisor Aaron Nauth stands on the stump of a centuries old tree and looks over an old clearcut that his team has thinned on the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest outside Takilma, Ore.

TAKILMA, Ore. (AP) — On a steep slope of the Rogue River-Siskiyou National Forest, a crew of young men with chain saws and hardhats worked their way through an old neglected clearcut, cutting brush and young trees and piling the remains to be burned later.

Freshly trained and closely supervised, the crew took care to leave behind volunteer sproutings of dogwood, madrone and huckleberry as well as the sugar pine and Douglas fir planted here 20 years ago. The pattern is designed to grow into a healthy forest less vulnerable to wildfire and better for fish and wildlife, rather than just turn out timber.

The House Hope Stewardship Project, taken off the shelf with $1.4 million from President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus package, will thin and restore 890 acres.

It’s a tiny fraction of the 60 million to 80 million acres the U.S. Forest Service estimates need it nationwide, but people here feel as if this is a start — not only to grappling with the growing threat of wildfire in a warming climate, but in healing rifts between environmentalists, the timber industry and the Forest Service that have left the national forests in limbo.

Read the full article »

Great news. The Mexican government of the state of Baja California has awarded Old-Growth Again (makers of Forever Redwood furniture) the certification of officially being a “safe enterprise” (Empresa Segura). That means we met a series of standards to maintain safe working conditions for our employees. We’re very proud of all our employees whose diligence made this possible, and we commit ourselves to continually meeting the goals of workplace safety along with exceptional quality in our hand-crafted Redwood furniture. We also offer our thanks to the government of Baja California for the recognition and support.

Raul Hernandez (CEO of Old-Growth Again Restoration Forestry, Inc.) receives the "Empresa Segura Award" (Safe Enterprise Award for Employee Safety) from representatives of the State Government of Baja California. April 1, 2009; Ensenada, Baja California.