Boycotting tropical timber reduces its economic value and provides an incentive to burn down forests, making them available for subsequent agricultural use or livestock farming. In contrast, a certification scheme for sustainability produced timber (tropical or non-tropical) protects the forests...

For the most part, Brazil's forests were not harvested, but annihilated, and relatively little was extracted for the benefit of Brazilians, a tragedy perhaps worse than deforestation alone. Fruitless Trees aims to make sense of what at first glance appears to be the senseless destruction of...

Indonesia is the world's largest producer of logs from tropical rainforest. The logs are primarily used in the plywood industry which grew from virtually nothing in 1979 to become, within a decade, first, the greatest producer of tropical plywood, then the greatest exporter of all plywood, and...