Because I wanted to buy a rosewood whistle from a member on this forum and because I heard some rumours about the trade in rosewood (incl. African blackwood) being restricted I read some on the internet and received some advice on this forum and came to the conclusion that rosewood and blackwood instuments (flutes, whistles, guitars and all instruments containing even the slightest bit of these woods) are endangered species…
Taking one on your travels shouldn’t pose to much of a problem but trading or even gifting one in your own country and especially abroad will set you up with a load of problems. This is all done to project the trees which supply the wood… A worthy cause, no doubt, but this also means instruments send without the proper (and costly) paperwork can be confiscated and fines/other sentences can be donned out…
Both the flute and piping forums here, as well as many other instrument forums elsewhere (concertina.net for example), have discussed this in some detail. Best look there to see which woods are included and what is required when crossing borders.
Shouldn’t we be more worried about killing the earth one species at a time rather than worrying about our convenience? We, as a human race, have known for centuries about waste and extinction, and have given exactly zero $hits. How many have known certain woods were becoming more rare and have still bought them? How many have bought Ivory while knowing it comes from elephants? This problem will NOT go away without legislation. Even if these restrictions aren’t the greatest, at least there is something in place.
Extinction is a natural and continual process; there are orders of magnitude more species that are extinct than there are currently living species. 99.999% of them were extinct long before man was here. Yes, we are wasteful, no doubt.
It won’t go away with legislation either. The great lesson of the 18th and 21st amendments to the U.S. constitution is, you can’t legislate morality.
It is. But in this case it is like the argument that the climate has always changed, used in order to deny the current process is human made. The elephant, giraffe, a large portion of primates and an astonishing long list of other species, animal and plant, they’re not part of an ongoing process, they’re endangered directly because of human behaviour. And that (behaviour) will therefor have to change, unless we’re OK with using it all up and leave the place destroyed and used up.
Legislation will not make things worse, obviously, but it won’t stop the fact that species are becoming endangered/extinct mainly because of the number of human beings and the pressure that is putting on the natural world. I can’t see that improving until nature decides to put a stop to it.
This right here. While I’d love to think that we can change our behavior enough to not wreck the place, the simple fact is there are too many of us. Depopulating would solve (or drastically reduce) pretty much every environmental problem we’re facing.
It’s difficult to get people on board with the idea, unfortunately.
Sadly (from my perspective) there are some governments and political factions around the world who are actively taking this philosophy (depopulation) to heart and putting it into action.
Best wishes.
Steve
[But then, on this forum we are supposed to be talking about whistles…]
The concerns we face about our planet are most well-founded these days. It’s important stuff and I worry about it all the time myself, but here we must also acknowledge Board policy: the sidetrack onto more momentous global affairs has begun to teeter on the edge of becoming political, and that, of course, is something we must take care to forego. It’s no reason not to talk about material supply and demand itself, though, so perhaps this would be the ideal time to bring things back on-topic.
I agree that it’s difficult to talk about the ecology of supply and demand - indeed, about ecology at all - without touching on politics; I also agree that Board policy does make acknowledging relevant political facts a bit tricky. The question to ask, then, is how far do we go? But you guys are the best, as ever.
The bottom line is that wind instruments can be made out of darn near anything. There is no one best material, only preferences. How many of our preferences have to do with design rather than materials? And how many of our preferences in sound are really minor? Can’t we still make good music with mopane or plastic or whatever will be the next thing?
I’m not quite catching your drift, here, so maybe you could give us some examples of what you have in mind. In the meantime materials are still worth talking about, and it doesn’t always simply come down to how we think they sound. Cocus, blackwood, and other striking exotics are certainly prestige materials because of their appearance, and that’s an additional reason for people to want them. I wouldn’t even think of putting the words “boxwood” and “covet” into the same sentence, yet tone for tone, boxwood flutes stand proudly with the best. To some, beauty matters, and to that end, precious materials count. It’s the same reason people used ivory and tortoise shell (and, it must be said, look what happened). Sustainable blackwood farming is being attempted at this time, but I don’t know how that future is looking. As to mopane being thought the more ethical choice, I seem to recall someone saying that even mopane numbers are close to, if not already, facing pressure.
Bamboo is the only truly sustainable life-based material suitable for woodwinds, at least that that I can think of. Now try selling that across the board. Bamboo contrabassoons are probably out of the question. Still, I must say that the idea of bamboo uilleann pipes sounds like an intriguing possibility, particularly if you’re considering certain species for their visual impact. Now that would be an exotic set.
More worryingly, there are people in positions of power who simply deny that there’s a problem, in the face of a growing political consensus to the contrary (the scientific consensus has been in place for a long time). We will all reap what these despicable opportunists and liars sow.
You mean with a harvesting cycle short enough for a modern ‘I want it now’ economy? Rosewood is wood. It grows on trees. When the British Navy used oak for its ships it made sure that there were stands of close-planted trees that could be harvested in 100 years or so to provide straight timber. I guess the guys who planted (or allowed) the second growth softwood forest in North America were not expecting a commercial return for a few decades either.
There are a lot of families to be fed and clothed between the artisan whistle maker, the forester/farmer who could plant out the seedlings, and is his successors in the communuty who harvest them. CITES is part of a system that makes it that bit harder for the families of criminal gangs and corrupt officials to take their cut. The more money that goes to foresters and their communities the more incentive there is for them to devote time to sustainable harvesting of natural forest and planting of new.
It’s hard to see how whistle players and makers can invest in sustainable forestry schemes but many of these schemes are only viable at start-up due to investments from NGO’s largely funded by charitable donations - there is a lot of ‘research and development’ to do to in (and by) the communities to make it work.
So how about researching some NGO’s promoting sustainable forestry and either making a small donation or suggesting to the big woodwind makers that they make big donations?
I think my bamboo dizi, in black, is beautiful. It appears to be handling various temperature and humidity conditions very well too. So as far as I’m concerned, bamboo is good. But admittedly just saying ‘bamboo’ may make people think of cheap flimsy things. Old camping chairs.. but bamboo is a fantastic material. When I go cross-country skiing in mountains, days away from people and phone coverage, I only use bamboo ski poles. They are extremely strong, and can be made stronger by covering the ‘joints’ (with tape or whatever - they do that with the dizi too), and, if it does break it can be fixed with tape. Nothing of that works on a metal or fiber pole.
I like bamboo.
Naturally. Under present conditions I don’t foresee that culture changing any time soon, whatever I might do myself. But there’s also a lot of waste built into the wooden instrument-making process that could be lessened using species that are already tubular to begin with. I do recognize the proposition’s unlikelihood, however, because for Western instruments this would mean a sea change from long-established building methods, and as Tor pointed out, bamboo carries none of the material cachet of exotic hardwoods for what we think of in the West as fine instruments. A hundred years hence, though - who knows?
So far as ‘our instruments’ are concerned is it that bad? The timber is slow growing but whistles and flutes are items that have long lives that can be extended by repairs using modern materials. They don’t, I hope, often end up in landfill when a fashion changes.
At present the differential in labour cost between the maker in the developed world and the forester is large. So a hike in materials costs (passed along the line by some sort of fair trade arrangement) that would make sustainable management economically viable might not increase the ‘cost per tune played’ enough to put off a player who wanted “the material cachet that exotic hardwoods have for what we think of in the West as fine instruments”. For the less well-off makers might offer lower-cost materials
How much more would we have to pay for ‘our instruments’ so that once projects like this http://www.blackwoodconservation.org have got the techniques and business models established they would propagate to other areas and timbers on a purely commercial basis?
I don’t recall making a value judgment, only an observation.
To me, this brings us full-circle to the idea that perfectly good whistles like Generations, etc. are not to be sniffed at if they’re good enough for the greats. I confess I do wonder why whistlers shell out for fine tonewoods (I’ve never liked the feel of wooden whistles, personally, but that’s about it). But far be it from me to stick my nose into other people’s business.
