I used to drive a delivery truck in SF Bay. About every 4-6 months or so, we would have an order of two palettes of ebony that I would deliver to a guy in Marin County who would hand make high end Taylor guitars. I always thought the ebony was from Sri Lanka. The stuff looked beautiful. It was cut into strips just like in the video - maybe 1/4" thick x 5" wide x 9" long. They were coated in wax, tied with plastic strips and finally bundled in burlap. A palette was 500 I think. I always liked when that job came around because I knew I would be spending at least part of my day with this wood.

You know, Henry Ford did the same thing with his cars that Taylor is doing. He tried to own as many of the resource extraction companies as possible. In the 20's, he created his own town in Brazil called Fordlandia that was all about refining the rubber extraction process. It became a disaster for a lot of reasons and he lost millions of dollars. I've read a lot about the history of that place and the stories about dealing with workers, paying them well and providing safe working conditions are interesting and important when trying to understand all of the contingencies when we consume these kinds of commodities. That aside, Is what Bob Taylor doing about being environmentally conscientious or is it strictly business? It's both. When the business is the wood then it has to be.

It would've been great if he actually talked about the extraction process even more. For sure he has ecologists and botanists on his payroll that have forecasted all of this stuff for him. I'm curious what an Ebony tree needs to grow. Taylor should have a map of the world where Ebony can be naturally harvested. And why can't they be farm raised? Maybe investing in that kind of infrastructure is way more costly than paying villagers in Cameroon. But who knows, maybe in the future there will be a Taylorland somewhere in Africa - where stands of Ebony trees grow strong, and children with guns guard it.

Taylor guitars are what old guys that used to play guitar buy. For that kind of money, I'll take a nice Martin and the neck better not have any spots on it.

I don't know what the true motivation is, I would like to think that it's genuine but unfortunately, I find it hard to believe. His awakening to what was happening only occurred after he had an interest in the process. That said, I wouldn't care if the fret board of my guitar had spots as long as it played well.