buyer beware

gabriel and i recently visited ikea to look at kitchen furniture. we didn't buy any of that, but we bought a small cabinet for a bathroom.

the cabinet's swell, but i've always wondered, how do they make them so inexpensively? the morning paper held a partial answer: cheap materials. according to an article in the washington post by peter goodman and peter finn, china is ikea's largest supplier of wood furniture and russia is ikea's largest supplier of wood. ikea claims it audits its wood supplies, but they have only two foresters in china and three in russia. the problem is that great swaths of forest are being harvested illegally, shipped with falsified documents to china for production and the result is that the western diet for wood products will, if continued at the same pace as it's running today, exhaust the forest of some countries in just a decade. much of the wood harvested is protected, but apparently chinese import officials rarely verify documents and the production chain takes advantage of this oversight which spurs timber industries where there should not be any. so, the problem with ikea (or home depot, or kmart, or lowes, or any multinational) is that it's too easy for retailers to claim clean hands. the system which is supposed to protect forest resources in the places where most of the wood for our cheap products comes from is corrupt. i think probably the only gauge we have, as consumers, is to ask whether the price seems too good to be true (aka sustainable). this means we, as consumers, have to check our desires and purchase power with a vague and incomplete matrix of social and ecological concerns as we lust after product that is clear, immediate and available.