Old-World Craft, Third-World Development
One of the first things the conquistadors must have shed when they reached the shores of Mexico and Central America was their armor. As effective as it would have been against the spears and arrows of their native adversaries, in the steamy forests of the Yucatan a full suit of steel would be unbearably hot, heavy and hard to maintain. Modern woodworking machinery suits the tropics just about as well. In an environment that can receive a foot or more of rainfall during each month of the rainy season, rust blooms on steel almost before your eyes. Saw blades are quickly dulled by dense, resinous hardwoods, and power supplies in many developing countries are erratic, at best. Kiln-dried wood is, in much of Latin America, a lot harder to find than an ecotourist. GreenWood takes a different approach to working wood… ▪︎ Read more (PDF)
An edited version of a program that aired in 1998 on the CBC program "The Nature of Things" with David Suzuki (by Asterisk Productions, Victoria, BC, Canada)
