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Iroko
Where to start? Mostly illegally logged from the finest remaining rainforests on the planet, profits financing the arms trade and still no way to artificially produce saplings, Iroko is an environmental disaster. Yet nearly every single retailer of Iroko will try and tell you it is from sustainable sources.
Rainforest currently accounts for 6% of the earth's landmass, down from an estimated original 17% before man invented chainsaws. Still home to two thirds of the world's species, our rainforests, the lungs of the Earth, have never been more important.
In the equatorial rainforest of central Africa, once part of a 4000 mile unbroken blanket of green from Senegal to Uganda, rainforests have been decimated by commercial logging; currently rainforest the size of a football pitch is destroyed every single second, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Iroko is one of the prime reasons for this logging. A strong hard wood, it has characteristics useful in construction like any hardwood, it is eagerly felled. The problem is man has not yet found a way to artificially germinate Iroko. But in fact that is less than half the problem. Firstly, there is no incentive to replant the rain forest, even if the technology were available - illegal loggers and bankrupt dictatorships have no such conscience. Secondly, this logging destroys the habit for millions of plants and animals every year. Mountain gorillas are a prime example of a species driven to the brink of extinction by the destruction of rain forests. But thirdly, and perhaps most often overlooked, is the destination of the profits from the illegal, and a lot of the time legal logging; the arms trade. What better to finance your own private army by cutting down a few thousand trees, and what better way to bring misery and suffering to entire populations.
Bizarrely, whilst the diamond trade has found a way to prevent 'conflict diamonds' from Angola getting in to main stream markets, hardly any western government has banned Iroko, or any of the other rainforest hardwoods like Wenge (an endangered species) or Sapele. Until it becomes a matter of simple economics - until customers stop buying products made from Iroko, the destruction of the planets remaining rainforests will continue unabated. We really do have a choice. The sad thing is, it's not as if Iroko is that attractive anyway.
 Images like this may be easy pickings for environmentalists, but the hard fact of the matter is that what they portray is entirely real. With no where to live, the mountain gorillas and thousands of other species living in rainforests will be gone forever. And with it, eleven percent of the planet's capacity to process carbon dioxide.
Whilst economics drive destruction in some parts of the world, they have entirely the opposite effect in others; the demand for hardwoods in North America - home to the largest natural deciduous forests in the world - has led to new plantations outstripping logging by 2.7 to 1. All driven by forward looking economics.
So when you are considering a new worktop for your kitchen and the brochure or website proudly announces that 'all of our lumber is from sustainable sources' which includes Iroko, ask yourself.....
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