Ever since 2011, Taylor Guitars’ Bob Taylor has been on a mission of tonewood sustainability. However, while Taylor has been replanting ebony trees in Cameroon for 15 years, he’s now urging the rest of the guitar industry to become more environmentally conscious – because wood isn’t an endless resource.
In an essay originally published in The Washington Post, Taylor insists: “if your business depends on a natural resource, stewardship isn’t optional – it’s part of the job”. With trees taking hundreds of years to grow back, Taylor explains that big guitar manufacturers need to consider how sustainable their business practices are.
As Taylor explains, his company first began giving back to the environment in 2011. “We became co-owners of an ebony mill there, seeing it as an opportunity to take greater responsibility for our wood in a complicated region of the world,” he writes. “Ebony has long been prized for stringed musical instruments, but basic questions about it – how much exists, how it grows, how it reproduces – were surprisingly hard to answer.”
After working with scientists at the Congo Basin Institute, Taylor worked to support a long-term research and reforestation initiative known as the Ebony Project. As he explains, “the work has planted tens of thousands of ebony and fruit trees on community-controlled lands bordering protected forest areas”.
While Taylor sought to discover more about where he was sourcing his ebony from, plenty of other manufacturers remain in the dark. It’s an issue that is seemingly rooted in complacency: “The species [companies once] relied on – spruce, maple, mahogany, rosewood, ebony – [have] been used for generations and [at a certain time] seemed abundant, locally available and affordable.”
“Over five decades, I’ve seen the materials we use become more expensive, like everything else,” he later continues. “I’ve also watched available trees get younger and smaller, and, if you’re not careful, less predictable in quality. But perhaps the biggest change has been the paperwork: There is now an ever-growing list of requirements tied to national laws and international agreements.”
And it’s not simply a case of planting trees for your own usage – trees can take up to 100 years to grow to a sufficient level for crafting instruments. So the focus shouldn’t be on the self, but on the future of the environment.
He also notes that ebony trees are also seeing a decline due to the mass poaching of elephants. As elephants tend to snack on the fruit of the ebony tree, they pass on seeds in their faeces – but, without as many elephants, the ebony tree isn’t getting replanted as much as it used to.
“The future of a material used to make guitars is tied to the fate of a critically endangered animal…” Taylor says. “In 1974, I was a kid from San Diego who wanted to build guitars. I could never have imagined it would one day lead to me supporting elephant dung research in Africa. But you can’t unknow what you know.”
“It’s a reminder that supply chains don’t begin in factories,” he says. “They often begin in ecosystems, which are complex, interdependent and often poorly understood.”
To round off, Taylor ends on a very serious final note, emphasising just how important it is for manufacturers to consider their environmental impact: “The question isn’t whether businesses should help sustain the resources they use – it’s whether they can afford not to.”
