'Good wood' labeling: Can it save Asia's tropical forests?

The next time you're in a Home Depot or Lowe's, stroll down the lumber aisles. Check out that $26 sheet of lauan plywood or the $22 hardwood doors.

You're probably looking at "stolen" goods.

"Lauan" is the trade name for hardwood milled from the rainforest trees that grow in Indonesia and Malaysia. It accounts for about 80 percent of all tropical timber sold in the US. And, according to a not-yet-published report from the World Wildlife Fund, an estimated 7 out of every 10 trees cut down in Indonesia are from an illegal or uncontrolled harvest.

In short, consumers in the US are unwittingly contributing to the destruction of Indonesia's tropical forests. At current rates of deforestation, that means some of the most biologically diverse rainforests on earth will be gone in just four years.

But a "good wood" certification effort is just getting started, offering hope by laying bare the connection between the chainsaw gangs in Southeast Asia and the wood on store shelves.

The goal is to create a market for eco-friendly timber by riding the same wave of environmental consciousness that is starting to build markets for "fair trade" coffee, bananas, and cocoa.

Certification systems have been set up to review which forests are being the most responsibly logged, and to reward their owners with higher prices and more customers.

To its boosters, forest certification could be the rainforests' salvation. "Market demand can change forest practices,'' says Rod Taylor, an ecologist at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Asia.

A coalition of environmentalists and timber executives called the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is actively testing that theory. The Oaxaca, Mexico-based group's voluntary certification program is the most rigorous in the world - and the only one endorsed by the WWF.

The idea is to inform consumers about where wood comes from and at what environmental cost.

That's an almost revolutionary step for an industry that has traditionally focused on a wood's strength or color, not on its place of origin.

The US market for Southeast Asian timber was first developed 40 years ago by the Philippines, with the timber marketed as lauan or Philippines Mahogany, a trade name created by the US Forest Service to help Filipino logging companies sell their wood.

Today, there's almost no commercial logging in the Philippines. "There is no forest left in the Philippines, and Indonesia is going down the same road, just 15 years later,'' says Lisa Curran, a Yale University ecologist who is studying the impact of logging in Indonesia.

"This is the most unregulated industry on the planet,'' says Mike Roselle at Greenpeace in Washington. "You buy a $10 bottle of wine from Chile, and you can pinpoint the winery owner and when his grandfather founded it. You buy a $200 roof beam, and it's a mystery.''

If Indonesia's tropical rainforests are to be saved, say environmentalists, the mystery has to be taken out of the business. In the past decade, according to the World Bank, the rate of deforestation in Indonesia has almost doubled, from 2.47 million to 4.2 million acres per year.

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