While campaigns such as Musicwood (see blog 2 below and here) have been working with guitar manufacturers and loggers in Alaska to protect ancient forests from unsustainable logging practices, Pacific Northwest Maples are being illegally logged and turned into guitars.

As an article in the Seattle Times notes, “All around Western Washington, from backyards to fragile stream banks, grand old big-leaf maples are being felled and dismembered to feed a black market born of an insatiable demand for the hardwood and its eye-catching whorls and ripples.” These maple thieves are cutting these trees, selling “pieces hardly larger than a shoebox, neatly carved from the base of the log.”

If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, it’s still a crime. And the guitar you see for sale might very well be part of the crime scene.