Introduction

This chapter considers how the electric guitar is entwined with ecological issues—materially, culturally, and politically. Its first section discusses the electric guitar’s composite materials—metals, plastics, and especially woods—linking them to upstream impacts, and legal and environmental conflicts. To purists, Leo Fender’s 1950s Telecaster captures the electric guitar’s rock ’n’ roll sensibility—an unpretentious “slab” of swamp ash and a maple neck, bolted together with a thick metal bridge plate and straightforward pickups, in utilitarian simplicity. In the seven decades since, electric guitar makers have brought together more luxurious materials—mahoganies (Swietenia spp.), rosewoods (Dalbergia spp.), ebonies (Diospyros spp.), koa (Acacia koa)—linking increasingly scarce materials with wider colonial legacies. Now troubling the industry are a suite of environmental problems that interrupt material resource supply, including species endangerments, trade restrictions, and climate change. The second section considers new sustainability initiatives amid growing resource insecurity and a changing climate. Attempts at ecological recuperation encompass diversification of timbers, forest restoration, salvage supply chains, new materials, and urban tree planting schemes. The third section turns to guitar players, asking questions of how we, as musicians, find ourselves entwined within, and in many ways responsible for, the instrument’s ecological dilemmas. Beyond matters of the electric guitar’s material components are the visceral relatings that unfurl between players, the instrument, and the upstream sources of physical materials. Throughout the chapter, we draw upon our long-standing research project tracing the guitar “in rewind” back to forest origins, including interview quotes from wood experts in the guitar industry that we have interviewed across the globe since 2014. Any direct quotes otherwise not attributed elsewhere result from this primary research.¹

Ecological Origins

Electric guitars are made from diverse, matter-of-fact materials brought together in factories and workshops—principally metals, plastics, and woods—and to a lesser extent, bone and tortoiseshell, as well as new experimental substitutes such as carbon fibers and micarta (a resin-based composite of canvas, paper, linen, and fiberglass, increasingly used in place of ebony for fretboards). For musicians and music fans, the electric guitar is a symbol of postwar global cultural homogenization—rock ’n’ roll music and (Americanized) popular culture. The globe is, in another sense, captured within the guitar itself—in the very mix of substances brought together in its manufacture.

Understanding the ecological dimensions of electric guitars thus requires knowledge of the whereabouts of these materials and associated upstream environmental, social, and labor impacts. Metals used in guitars range from stainless steel and nickel for frets and strings (and to a lesser extent, cobalt, titanium, and chrome); copper wire in pickup winding; aluminum, nickel, and cobalt in pickup magnets (the famed “al-ni-co” alloy); zinc alloys, chrome, and steel in machine heads (tuning pegs); and steel for bridges and Stratocaster-style tremolo blocks. Brass—an alloy of copper and zinc long known for its sonorous qualities on labrosones (trumpets, horns, saxophones)—also features on higher-end tuners, nuts, frets, and bridges. Each of these metal elements has its own set of environmental issues, from localized mining impacts upon local populations, landscapes, waterways, and air quality, to wider “earth shaping” processes such as colonialism, capitalism, and the ethical problems of extractivism—whereby western mining companies treat dispersed distant places not as communities in which to invest for the longer term, but as “resource banks” to exploit for profit.²

Plastics, used in scratch plates, tuner and pickup casings, nuts, and knobs, bring their own ecological entanglements. Being petrochemical products, guitar plastics are linked to fossil fuels and places of oil extraction and distribution, from Mississippi to the Middle East, Russia to Singapore, Indonesia to Venezuela.³ Encased in your electric guitar’s volume knob or pickguard are remnants of these distant places—molecular residues from fossilized organic matter deposited deep in the earth millions of years prior. Problems of fossil fuels use are well known, from air and water pollution to climate change, chemical leaching, and runoff into water catchments, alongside political implications including dependencies on oil-exporting autocratic regimes, and the disempowerment and racial discrimination of labor.⁴ While the amounts of metals or plastics in an electric guitar might be infinitesimal compared with larger consumer and industrial goods, they share connections to these dispersed environmental and social problems.

More conspicuous are the ecological entanglements concerning the woods from which electric guitars are made. The science of wood properties and norms of acoustics and aesthetics designate which species are best for guitar making. For acoustic guitars, the soundboard is critical, with only a narrow range of species, such as spruces (Picea spp.) and cedar (Cedrela odorata), able to combine acoustic quality, workability, vitreousness (reverberation), beauty, and structural strength. While for electric guitars, wood choice might be less important—given the influence of pickup type and windings, effects pedals, string, nut and fret metals, and amp preferences—there are similar norms of manufacture, sound, and appearance. Guitarists describe certain instruments as having a “good feel”—referring both to the texture of wood under fingers, and the overall reverberating qualities of the instrument body. A proficient player can hear and describe the sonic qualities of swamp ash (Fraxinus spp.) versus mahogany, or distinctions between maple (Acer spp.) and rosewood necks. Ebony fingerboards feel slinkier than grainier rosewood. The former contributes to a denser, mid-range sound; the latter to a warmer, open tonal combination. The Telecaster’s maple neck imparts a brightness in combination with the bridge pickup that cannot be replicated using other species. As guitar makers and players have developed and tested new models and agreed on preferred combinations, a heightened awareness of the material and acoustic properties of trees has evolved.

This awareness binds all forms of guitar manufacture—acoustic and electric—to global timber supply chains. In electric guitars, the most common include: alders (Alnus spp.), swamp ash, and mahogany for bodies; maple, mahogany, and walnut (Juglans nigra) for necks; and maple, ebony, and rosewood for fingerboards. Each wood has its distinctive route from forest to factory, as the wood passes through many hands—those of forest managers, sawmillers, truckers, and barge operators, and guitar-making workforces (from dedicated wood shop staff to machinists and workers who carve, sand, and finish instruments on the factory floor). Many of the electric guitar’s resource supply routes were well established before the instrument’s invention and mass production. The mold was earlier cast by preindustrial instrument makers (especially in European centers such as Cádiz, Grenada, Venice, Vienna, and Cremona) and further intensified by migrant entrepreneurs, who industrialized acoustic instrument production in North America from the 1850s through to the 1920s. European conifers from the central Alps were expensive to import into North America and insufficient to satisfy expanded industrial capacity, so makers shifted instead to supplies from Canada, the Appalachians, Adirondacks, and northern Michigan. Maples thus might arrive from Quebec; spruces (Picea spp.) from West Virginia and later, British Columbia and Alaska.

International routes also preceded the advent of the electric guitar: mahoganies arrived from Mexico, Cuba, and Honduras; ebony from equatorial Africa; rosewood from Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Acoustic guitar production amplified from the 1890s to 1920s—the very same period in which colonial expansion, enormous population growth, urbanization, and industrialization in the United States, Canada, Latin America, and Asia triggered widespread land clearing and logging. Forest exploitation, imperialism, and industrial-capitalist trade went hand in hand, dispossessing resident Indigenous peoples of land while generating new export resource industries in agriculture and timber. Unprecedented volumes of “exotic” woods were unleashed into the global trade. All of this was made feasible by the invention of the steamship and expansion of a more efficient, longer-distance oceanic trade, linking South American and Asian ports with rapidly growing port cities in North America and Europe.⁵ Tropical hardwood specialists supplying guitar factories burgeoned along New York’s busy waterfront: F.A. Mulgrew on Eighth Street, East River; J.H. Monteath on East Sixth Street; C.H. Pearson & Son at the foot of Twenty-First Street, Brooklyn. The system of timber trading had expanded and consolidated so much by the 1930s that Monteath alone could offer more than a hundred different timbers from all corners of the earth: rosewood from Brazil; mahogany from Honduras; padouk (Pterocarpus soyauxii) from the Congo; alamiqui (Solenodon cubanus) from Cuba; degame (Calycophyllum candidissimum) from Guiana. By the 1920s, the pattern of timber trade was well established, linking the woods made into guitars with a suite of ecological, political, economic, and cultural upheavals, such as the clearing of the Mata Atlântica (Atlantic Forest) in Brazil; colonial dispossession in Latin America and the Pacific Northwest; and poor labor conditions in Africa and Indonesia. Unlike today’s guitar industry wood experts, who must go to India or Guatemala to inspect suppliers and verify sources for Fender or Gibson, representatives from earlier manufacturers could simply drop by the New York docks and select the best tropical hardwoods on offer. They almost certainly would not have known how the timber was sourced, exactly where it came from, or with what effect.⁶

As electric guitars proliferated in the postwar period, their designs combined elements from earlier instrument manufacturers with new materials. Gibson’s iconic Les Paul, ES-335, and SG styles displayed echoes of the company’s earlier specialties in acoustic, archtop, and mandolin manufacture: carved maple tops, for example, on the Les Paul; and set-neck designs making the most of the structural qualities of mahogany. When Leo Fender morphed early lap steel and electric prototypes into the Telecaster and subsequent models, he preferred—at least initially—to locate cheap woods for interchangeable, bolt-on parts. Mike Born, Fender’s head of wood technologies when we interviewed him in 2019, explained:

Nevertheless, concerns grew around deforestation, linked to colonization, agricultural expansion, urbanization, and industrialization. For the guitar industry, early signals of rosewood scarcity emerged in the mid 1960s with the rise of mass manufacturing. Production escalated to levels greater than the overall stock of replenishable timbers. As baby boomers purchased the same guitars played by their rock and folk heroes, guitar factories began to look for viable alternative timbers. Following Martin Guitars’s lead, electric guitar manufacturers switched supply from Brazil to the more readily available Indian rosewood (Dalbergia latifolia).

Growing public awareness of animal extinctions and the importance of biodiversity conservation, coupled with growing multilateral cooperation after the Second World War, fueled new forms of international regulation. In the 1960s, discussions began around restricting trade in endangered species as outrage grew over trades in furs, elephant ivory, rhinoceros horn, and shark fins. A 1963 World Conservation Union resolution led to the establishment of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in July 1975. In time, CITES would include more than 35,000 animal and plant species. Individual species are listed on Appendices 1, 2, or 3 of the Convention, depending on the degree of threat to their survival. Appendix 3 listings are effectively alarm bells rung by national jurisdictions seeking international assistance to limit commercial trade, thus signaling possible future threats and impending elevation to Appendix 2 status. Appendix 2 contains the majority of listed species, with accompanying controversies over what have become known as “non-detriment cases”: whether seized specimens were extracted in a manner detrimental to the survival of the species. Appendix 1, reserved for species at most threat of extinction, effectively bans international trade in them.

Several guitar timber species are now CITES-listed. The vanguard was Brazilian rosewood (Dalbergia nigra). Concerns over deforestation escalated with rapid urbanization and national developmental projects following the opening of the Trans-Amazonian Highway in 1972. Agricultural clearing, urban development, and forestry were accompanied by rising conservation awareness and science. Brazil’s government introduced the first threatened plant species lists and tightened regulation of timber exports. Converging with international momentum around CITES, in 1992, Dalbergia nigra was the first tree species listed on CITES Appendix 1. Brazilian rosewood, used ubiquitously for fretboards, backs, and sides, had in effect become an illicit commodity, akin to ivory. Listings of other timbers followed. Big-leaf mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla) was listed in Appendix 3 first by Costa Rica (1995), then by Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru (1998–2001). Elevation to Appendix 2—a first for a high-volume timber species—followed in 2002. In January 2017, all other Dalbergia species, including Indian rosewood (D. frutescens) and cocobolo (D. retusa) plus bubinga (Guibourtia spp.), were listed in Appendix 2.

CITES is a system into which nation-states enter voluntarily. There are currently more than 180 signatory countries. It does not, however, replace national laws. Each nation-state must adopt its own legislation and fund agencies to ensure enforcement. In the US, the Lacey Act—legislation originally stewarded by Congressman John Lacey in 1900 to stop poaching and preserve wild game—was overhauled in 2008. Its scope was broadened from a primary focus on animals to include plants, timber, and wood products, tightening global efforts to curb illegal logging and aligning the United States with CITES. In a world first, the updated Lacey Act criminalized imports of timber that failed to comply with laws of another country.

Controversies over links between guitar making, forest destruction, and illicit sourcing of timber all culminated in the raids on Gibson Guitar factories in Nashville and Memphis in 2009 (and again in 2011). Newly empowered by the amended Lacey Act, on November 17, 2009, US Fish and Wildlife marshals moved through the Nashville plant, seizing raw materials, parts, and partially and fully finished guitars. Gibson, they would allege, had not acted with due care to ensure timbers complied with Madagascar’s national regulations, thus contravening CITES and the Lacey Act. News of the raid spread like wildfire. Panic set in among guitar industry executives, factory managers, and guitar players. Gibson issued press releases denouncing the raids. Nervous timber suppliers and guitar manufacturers scrambled for legal clarity. The regulatory environment spurred by CITES and the Lacey Act applied universally and retrospectively. Then in 2011, Gibson’s Nashville facility and its Memphis factory (where ES-335s were at the time produced) were again raided, this time over poor tracing and verification of rosewood from India. Gibson had become, in its own view, “embroiled in nothing less than a federally orchestrated witch hunt.”⁸ The government was accused of regulatory overreach, subjecting American businesses and workers to foreign laws. Energized by Fox News coverage, the Tea Party rallied behind Gibson, along with the National Association of Music Merchants. Meanwhile, environmental groups backed the government’s stricter stance. Reports from the European Union and nongovernment agencies documented the widespread trade in illegally logged timbers. Online guitar forum Reverb launched an awareness-raising campaign in support of the Lacey Act, pushing for an end to the trade in “blood-wood.” The matter was eventually settled out of court. But the larger message was now clear: historical overexploitation of forests by humans had finally caught up with contemporary manufacturing industries, which rely on the global trade in timber. And the industry with the “largest target on its back,” in the words of one wood supplier we interviewed, was guitar making.

Sustainability Initiatives

As historical sources of timber dry up and more complex international laws govern and protect threatened species, guitar makers have sought more sustainable alternatives and rethought designs that cherish (or at least tolerate) imperfections and timber’s infinitely variable character. Guitar manufacturers responded to the Gibson Guitar raids with various attempts to improve transparency and sustainability in resource procurement—so much so that details of the geographic origins of woods included in guitar manufacture have now become marketable, especially where there is the potential for “virtue signaling” their sustainability credentials.

Procurement documentation has taken on added significance. CITES addresses multiple actors—landowners, cutters, mills, traders, manufacturers, and retailers. CITES compliance depends upon the integrity and resourcing of individual countries’ biodiversity protection laws and enforcement agencies. That varies enormously. In the United States, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, and the EU, resource management and customs institutions are generally strong. Countries with poorer regulation, limited funding, or political instability have less-than-ideal forestry monitoring and verification practices. That, in part, explained the Gibson raids, caused by concerns around illegal logging and untrustworthy government regulation in Madagascar, at the time midway through a volatile political coup.

Nowadays, eliminating supply chains with questionable legality is a priority; hence for rosewood fingerboards, Indian sources now dominate. According to Mike Born, rosewood buying in India remains the most reliable because it has “been around for a hundred years. The government controls all sales, at a straight auction … You can’t have something in your sawmill that you didn’t buy from the government.” The rosewood used for Fender fretboards “comes from standing dead trees that are harvested … The government keeps a tight rein on it. From the auction house to your sawmill, there’s a series of checkpoints that the truck travels through, and all documents must be signed off. There might be ten or twelve checkpoints. It’s quite a process.” “When it’s coming off the sawmill,” Born elaborated, “there’s a guy right there writing what log number it is, just in case. We know exactly where it came from.” A number is spray-painted on the end of each log, linking it to all the necessary information on its harvest history (the main source regions being Karnataka and Kerala states in India’s tropical southwest). Keen musicians can now find that number on their finished Fender in a tiny square recess cut into the neck block, among the quality-control stickers and stamps for the date and the worker responsible for making it.

Ongoing problems with supply chain legality, transparency, and intermittency have driven manufacturers to innovate with alternatives and substitutes. Wood species are not directly fungible, but approximations are possible. More plentiful woods are a responsible choice, especially concerning guitars made and marketed at lower prices—for example, acacias are used in many Chinese-made budget guitars. In a clear sign that alternatives to the “traditional” woods are necessary, in 2019, Fender shifted away from rosewood, replacing it with pau-ferro (Libidibia ferrea) on Mexican-made Stratocasters. Opinions among players are divided over the qualities of synthetic micarta, Richlite and Rocklite, as substitutes for ebony fingerboards. Given that a certain proportion of manufacturers and players have embraced them suggests that such materials have a market.

Another strategy has been to diversify sources and materials. Rather than rely upon single species harvested in unsustainable quantities from a limited number of sources, manufacturers spread the impact across suppliers, geographic places, materials, and species. The growing inconsistency of resource supply is, in this regard, both a problem and an asset for the guitar industry. Suitable timber dribbles in or comes in fits and flushes. That enables manufacturers to market limited editions and enables tonewood suppliers to favor one firm over another, depending on price and their sense that the timber will be responsibly used.

Another trend is to revive more plentiful local timbers. At Fender, Mike Born emphasized that “musical instruments were always developed from local woods,” citing the example of Stradivarius violins. “Some of us feel it would be nice to go back to that. What’s useable in our own backyard that we could design guitars around?” Summarizing future possibilities, Born sees “more recycled woods, reclaimed woods, and what I would call urban forestry. Less raw material coming out of the jungle. To expand our palate, you’ll see more limited runs, whether from redwood trees grown in Los Angeles or sinker logs pulled out of the bay.”

Companies have forged ahead with more sustainable local species, eliminating reliance on global supply chains, and the political and environmental complications (and accusations) that come with them. Australian guitar maker Maton, renowned for their native-timbered acoustic guitars used by Tommy Emmanuel, Keith Urban, and John Butler, have made a line of electric guitars using local woods, including Queensland maple (Flindersia brayleyana) for necks, Tasmanian blackwood (Acacia melanoxylon) for carved tops, and silver silkwood (Flindersia acuminata) and quandong (Eleaocarpus grandis) for bodies. The latter is harvested by Kirby Fine Timbers in Southeast Queensland from plantations on private land, originally established a century ago by forward-thinking landowners, and now maintained and replenished by Kirby for future use with a low-impact, selected harvest model. Single mature trees are felled in small numbers each year, well below the threshold at which the mixed-species forest continues to germinate seeds and regenerate itself.

Some plentiful alternatives also have their own cache and history, linked to twentieth-century experiments and budget models: Fender’s original prototype instruments were made from pine (Pinus spp.), which they reintroduced in 2017 as a limited edition. Tapping the trend for sustainable and salvaged timbers with interesting stories of provenance, the guitar was advertised as having come “full circle. This body wood began its functional life over 100 years ago as part of the Buckstaff Furniture Company’s facility in Oshkosh, WI before it was reclaimed, cooked and fashioned into an instrument. The grain, knotholes and man-made imperfections make each one unique.”⁹

Reclaimed and recycled woods are now much more common, sourced from everything from discarded piano soundboards to the rafters of Brooklyn buildings. Salvage specialists access sinker logs from wharves, fallen trees from forests and farms, and street and park trees that are now old or dangerous, due to be cut down by municipal councils, and that would otherwise be chipped for mulch or compost. Salvaging timbers is not without its own ecological impact. Fallen trees in forest environments, for example, provide important nutrients for fungi and seedlings (as they rot, they become so-called nurse logs); dead trees on farms and in forests are important habitats for birds, bats, possums, and other fauna. Nevertheless, salvaged timbers contribute to more diverse (and thus more resilient) supply chains and are popular among musicians, who appreciate the “story” that accompanies their instrument’s component materials.

Guitar industry figures are also taking matters into their own hands, planting trees in diverse places—on their own properties, on others’ private land, in partnership with manufacturing companies, cattle ranches, and Indigenous-owned and managed lands—so that wood for future use in guitar making may be available beyond their own lifetimes.¹⁰ Hawaiian koa, used in both acoustic and electric guitars, was overexploited by colonizing American interests in the late 1800s and early 1900s—the very same era in which the Brazilian, Indonesian, Pacific Northwest, Indian, and African forests were plundered by outsiders. While it was popular on interwar-era ukuleles and “Hawaiian” model acoustic guitars (notably Martins), koa’s use in instrument making had by the 1980s practically disappeared due to resource shortages. Yet plantations and resource recovery strategies have made koa feasible again in modest quantities, largely due to the efforts of guitar tonewood companies forging partnerships with landowners, guitar manufacturers, and Hawaiian interests. At Haleakala, on Maui, Paniolo Tonewoods was formed as a partnership between a ranching family business, Taylor Guitars, and specialist timber supplier Pacific Rim Tonewoods, to access plantations dating from the 1980s on private land. As that new venture matured, Paniolo Tonewoods developed relationships with Kamehameha Schools (a Hawaiian educational trust operating since 1887 via an endowment from Hawaiian princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop, and now Hawaii’s largest private landowner). On 500 hectares of Kamehameha land at Hōnaunau, limited quantities of degraded koa are being salvaged in return for conservation services. Bob Taylor also purchased 230 hectares of pasture outside Waimea, at the ideal elevation to grow koa. Paniolo Tonewoods will lease this, planting koa and other native species over the next several years.

Among guitar manufacturers and timber suppliers is a growing consensus that industrial forestry, fixed on cheap, fast-growing species for the construction and furniture industries, is unlikely to meet their needs. Thus, guitar industry figures must act now to secure resource supplies for future generations. Mike Born said, “We don’t have a lot of choice in what was planted 60, 70 years ago but you certainly do going forward … we’re at that point [where] we need to have that maturing of how you look at the future. There’s certainly a taste for it out there.”

While clearing for urbanization is often to blame for the annihilation of old-growth habitats, most notably Brazilian rosewood, cities may prove vital future habitats for guitar trees. Fender announced a new initiative with the US Forest Service and the Baseball Hall of Fame to encourage tree replanting schemes in inner cities. Baseball bats are made from American ash (Fraxinus pennsylvanica), as are Telecasters. Yet a notorious pest, the emerald ash borer, has in recent years annihilated ash trees across the continent, surviving warmer winters due to climate change, their populations exploding. The two niche industries—guitars and baseball bats—share the same problem of securing future resource supply. Fender’s idea is not for monocultural plantations of ash but replanting a variety of urban street trees, including ash, to disperse the genetic and geographic base of vulnerable species. “We have a chance now,” Born explained, “to replant old street trees. This time we could think a century down the road. Instead of planting a palm tree which has no real use, are there trees that at the end of their lifecycles can have a future life? It’s a worldwide discussion to have: what should we be planting for the future?” A pilot project has begun in Detroit with unemployed people working in nurseries. Ash borer-resistant strains of the tree have been identified in Michigan, so in Detroit, ash is being replanted as urban street trees when older ones die. “I love that thinking about centuries ahead,” says Mike. “Well, they’re trees. Let’s hope somewhere down the line somebody can see the effects of what we do.”

Many such innovations have been forced upon the industry because of legal compliance problems but also due to upstream scarcity issues and other environmental problems, notably climate change. Higher temperatures, more erratic rainfall, extreme storms, and extended droughts all challenge forests, foresters, and guitar timber supply chains. For an industry already rocked by illegal logging scandals and coping with profound changes to resource availability, there is further disruption ahead. Increased rates of species extinction and greenhouse gas emissions continue to draw the attention of climate scientists as key markers of the frightening epoch called the Anthropocene that we are said to have entered. With it come predictions of extensive volatility in social, economic, and geopolitical affairs. Without mitigation of climate change, temperatures could rise by an average of 3.6–4.5° Celsius; the Amazon could lose 69 percent of its plant species, and 60 percent of all species would be at risk in Madagascar.¹¹ Exactly how warming, drought, and more highly variable precipitation will proceed and impact on trees and forests remains essentially unknown. How trees will respond to higher temperatures and erratic rainfall, and how whole ecosystems and species assemblages will be reconfigured, is uncertain. Mountain and coastal forests are especially at risk. Less predictable fogs on the slopes of Hawaiian volcanoes threaten koa forests. In western Canada and the United States, trees are already dying in their millions from mountain pine beetle and other infestations brought about by higher temperatures that stress trees, and from warmer winters that fail to keep pathogens in check. Complicating matters is that in settler-colonial countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia, selective burning, once a feature of Indigenous land management, has been curtailed, enabling dangerous undergrowth to accumulate, and further fueling insect population explosions.

As manufacturers and timber suppliers respond and adapt to future challenges, electric guitars will involve more frequent use of human-made composites and carbon fibers but also less homogeneity in their woods, more diverse species, greater use of plentiful local timbers, and smaller productions runs.

Musicians’ Ecological Entanglements

While responsibility for improving upstream ecological impacts rests with guitar makers and materials suppliers, players must also acknowledge their role. The instrument in your hand is more than a utilitarian object. It is an achievement of human engineering and craft knowledge, assembling materials from around the world, and binding each of us as musicians to dispersed ecological origins. Its maple cap, rosewood fretboard, or koa body are physical remnants of distant forests that have grown for decades or even centuries, brought together with human ingenuity and skill inside factories and workshops. Whether aware of it or not, guitarists are entangled with material resource extraction and use. Corporeal engagements with timber in the moments of music making—fingers on fretboards, bodies sensing the “feel” of the instrument—are simultaneously dialogic acts with workers and trees. A wider geography of material relating spans continents and a host of intermediary actors, places, and technologies. With that is the challenging realization that our musical preferences and playing choices are bound up in histories of colonial violence and capitalist exploitation of nature.¹²

Most guitar players—and just about all the guitar makers and timber experts we encountered in our research—hold a degree of commitment to environmental values. Musicians, in general, lean to the left politically, so it is no surprise that guitar makers are increasingly touting their sustainability credentials in marketing guitars. No consumer surveys exist on the extent to which the sustainability record of manufacturers is driving musicians’ purchasing decisions, but both our experience talking to guitar players around the world and the industry’s insider accounts suggest that age, income, gender, voting preferences, and nationality are important. Interviewing guitar players at an elite guitar festival in North America, greater emphasis was placed on acoustic qualities (“sweet mid-range and punchy bottom end”), rare examples of fine woods, and luthier skill, than on sustainability impact or procurement integrity. Nevertheless, when prompted to consider ecological impacts, players were keen to ensure that makers were “doing the right thing.” Chris Cosgrove at Taylor said that “Guitars have become more personal. People are more interested in what’s in a guitar, where it’s come from. Have you done everything properly?” The guitar festival crowd is, nevertheless, generally wealthier, male, and older than the average demographic purchasing lower-priced mass-manufactured guitars from retail shops, which is more likely to be aged fifteen to thirty-five, female, and getting by on lower incomes while studying or entering careers for the first time.¹³ Despite limited incomes compared with older players, younger musicians appear more likely to pay attention to sustainability record—consistent with research on attitudes to climate change and environmental issues more broadly.¹⁴ Highly attuned to social media discourse, they are also more likely to spot “bullshit greenwashing” in the advertising of guitar manufacturers, in the words of one teenage female player we encountered in a guitar shop in Sydney, Australia. According to Mike Born, “Younger, millennial players are much more conscious about what their guitars are made out of than the older, more traditional players.”

There is, however, no way around the central issue affecting the guitar industry, and all industries reliant on timber: continued forest loss. As populations continue to rise and rates of per capita resource consumption escalate, forests continue to be cleared for timber, fuel, farmland, and urbanization. While the quantity of materials used in guitar making is dwarfed by those in the furniture, paper, pulp, and construction industries (not even accounting for 1 percent of global trade),¹⁵ scarcities affecting timber production and consumption globally inescapably impact musical instrument manufacture, too.

The wider variety of timbers used in electric guitars nowadays—from diverse and more plentiful species and recycled and salvaged sources—indicates that the instrument’s future sustainability will steer away from standardized designs and singular material sources, especially as machining techniques and baseline quality improve. “It’s really that simple,” said Born, “You can make guitars out of almost anything.”

Yet credibility with tonewoods is critical. Harvey Molotch described how consumer goods, over time, tend toward a “type form”: a standardized design for the object in question, expected by consumers even if technically superseded.¹⁶ Hence, the basic design and layout of cars have barely changed since the 1920s; computers and cellular devices use the QWERTY keyboard inherited from typewriters; Levi jeans continue to be made from a 1950s template using cotton denim with a signature red tab. The electric guitar is no different. While designs are perhaps less rigid than for acoustic guitars—where spruce tops and rosewood bridges are entrenched—many models and their component timbers are nonetheless encased in “tradition”: Fender Telecaster bodies made from swamp ash, Gibson Guitar bodies from mahogany with figured maple tops. Disdain toward purported lower-quality woods and the consumer adherence to “tradition” remain problems for advocates of sustainability reform. As one older, male, but otherwise very environmentally conscious, left-wing voting guitar player put plainly to us while sharing the stage at a local gig, “I will always play Telecasters with rosewood necks; I just can’t stand maple. It’s too bright, and I don’t like its feel under my fingers.”

More plentiful woods suffer because they have featured on budget guitars, even if their acoustic and engineering properties are suitable. Basswood, for example, is a staple in Japan (used in traditional stringed-instrument making) but has been stigmatized as “cheap” in America—even though featuring on early FujiGen Fender models that are now collectibles. While pine was used in Leo Fender’s original prototypes, and featured on recent Telecaster reissues, it remains essentially out of vogue, associated with cheap construction lumber. Many players remain resistant to guitars made from plain maple pieces, even though their acoustic performance is almost invariably better than those with highly flamed or bird’s-eye figure (due to consistent linear grain).

As the ecological controversies surrounding guitar making persist, the designs cannot be made to traditional recipes forever. Rosewoods and ebonies are scarcer and risky for manufacturers. Patrick Evans at Maton Guitars believes

Guitar players cherish their instruments, hoping their guitars will last for lifetimes and become heirlooms. But to value the instrument properly, consumers must understand the true value of input materials. Ed Dicks, a guitar wood supplier in Port Alberni, British Columbia, put it aptly:

A stubborn contradiction defines the link between guitars and deforestation: no matter what efforts manufacturers undertake to educate consumers and improve upstream resource stewardship, as profit-seeking companies they benefit from guitarists’ desire to accumulate guitars. A well-known meme among musicians is that the very best guitar in the world is the next one you plan to buy. So much is the affliction to overconsume ubiquitous that the phrase “GAS” (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) has gone from being an in-joke among players to a source of academic inquiry.¹⁷ Yet, endless consumption considering dwindling forests is not feasible. To do right by the planet, manufacturers should reduce production and consumers should buy fewer guitars—following the “reduce, reuse, recycle” adage. But that would fundamentally challenge the industry’s need for continual growth.

At this point, the conversation shifts to responsible use of the materials already extracted for guitar making. Several guitar makers and timber suppliers complained about pointless perfectionism among certain markets. Elite North American and European customers, as well as those from China and Japan, were considered “very traditional” and expect “perfect” guitars with impeccably parallel grains—unrealistic expectations in an era of scarcity. While such views might overgeneralize diverse attitudes among players, it certainly rang true at guitar festivals we attended in North America and Australia, where comparatively wealthy musicians sought high standards and revered the use of exemplar woods on their instruments. According to Maton’s Patrick Evans,

Also important are second-hand instruments and maintaining the structural integrity and playability of guitars that are already in the world. Expensive guitars that are well made and great to play are very likely to be cherished, maintained, and passed down to future generations; material stewardship is practically baked into them. Purchasers of high-end electric guitars expect them to be well made and long-lasting—an important cultural ecological value in a world of disposability. The same cannot be said for the millions of budget instruments made every year. While there is consensus in the industry around responsible resource stewardship, at the rock-bottom end of the market, price-squeezing drives a “race to the bottom” for cheap forest products and the exploitation of labor. A guitar or ukulele with a unit price of $34 is almost guaranteed to be unplayable and to have come from factories with poor working conditions, using timber sourced at very low cost through ruthless negotiations with suppliers. Guitar tonewood supplier David Kirby posed a poignant question about the flood of lower-quality wood and guitars: “Are we ruining our own market by producing too many guitars?” Although automation has made guitars cheaper and amplified proliferation, standards have improved, especially in Asia, where the bulk of cheap guitars are now made. The advent of CNC and Plek machines (which carve out necks and perform minuscule operations to finalize setup) means that a greater proportion of affordable guitars nowadays are more precise and playable. That, in turn, means that they may, too, circulate longer as useable objects, escaping the category of junk.

Conclusion

Environmental impacts are inevitable when humans make and consume things. Musical instruments are no different.¹⁸ The world could stop making electric guitars tomorrow, and it would mitigate upstream ecological impacts. But use of timber by guitar companies is tiny compared with furniture making or building construction—the larger drivers of forest loss. No longer making guitars would also deny the masses opportunities to buy and play guitars. Music is a global language, vital to cultural diversity, and the guitar has been a force for expression and emotion around the world, becoming a symbol of youth, empowerment, and countercultural resistance. For these reasons, the world needs guitars and will need mass manufacture. That also means producing guitars from physical materials, and those materials must come from somewhere. No matter how humans “manage” nature, there are compromises and contradictions. Adjustments and alternatives may seem disappointing or unwelcome now but will likely seem necessary in the long run. After all, musicians no longer insist on real tortoiseshell pickguards or ivory saddles. That musicians cherish their instruments, participate in active communities of practice, and are fans of certain makers and models, are sources of cautious optimism. The wood in your guitar is possibly from a tree that stood in a forest before the continent of North America was colonized by Europeans. Knowing this may further inspire musicians to buy carefully and value the instrument accordingly.