Neckblanks

		On the left is my old partner, John Curtis. John and I worked together at the old Luthier's Mercantile before we sold it to a German firm. In this recent photo at left, John is explaining to the locals in Copen, Honduras, what guitarmakers are looking for in mahogany guitar woods. John is a founding member of GreenWood, is on the board, and continues to serve forest communities throughout the Americas. Far left, when John was at Luthier's Mercantile. John, Richard Schneider, Mark Wescott, and Max Krimmel. Near left, John in the mid 80s in front of a stack of wood being readied for guitar backs and sides. Here's a little more about our efforts over the years:




Scott Landis, 2nd from right, founder of Greenwood. Scott was an editor and writer for the Taunton Press (The Workbench Book, The Workshop Book) John Curtis and I roped Scott into this business when we met at a GAL convention in Vermillion, SD in 1988. Scott was interviewing Kasha builder, Richard Schneider, at the time for the two above mentioned books. Somehow we talked Scott into traveling with John to Peru to write about the Palcazu Project. Scott was hooked. *(See below)
GreenWood and its Honduran counterpart, Fundación Madera Verde, received the first-ever Innovation Prize from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (FES). The $5,000 prize was awarded by an international panel of judges, based on a joint presentation by GreenWood and Madera Verde at the 20th Annual International Society of Tropical Foresters (ISTF) Conference, held at Yale's Kroon Hall January 30 to February 1, 2014.
From Greenwood's website: John Curtis Felipe Carrillo Puerto, México John Curtis is a self-described "serial ruminator" about sustainable forest management and reduced-impact logging. A former commercial fisherman, metal fabricator, salvage logger, feller, supplier of wood products for niche markets, and partner in the Luthier's Mercantile, a California importer and purveyor of guitar parts, John has worked in most sectors of the wood-products industry, from timber harvesting and sawmilling to container import and export and the marketing of processed parts. John is currently assisting forest communities in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico to develop dimensioned wood products that meet the standards of local, national and international markets. His life-long fascination with wood has resulted in a hands-on familiarity with most of the links in the "value chain," from the standing tree to the final invoice. John is a founding member of the Woodworkers Alliance for Rainforest Protection (WARP) and a GreenWood board member. He provides frequent consulting expertise to GreenWood on a wide range of wood processing subjects. Yadira Molina Cruz of Fundacion Madera Verde and Scott Landis, founder and president of GreenWood. Shown accepting Yale's prize in Innovative Forestry (from among a field of 40 international applicants!) Scott Landis South Berwick, Maine Scott Landis has been working with wood, trees and forests—or writing about them—for more than 30 years. After paddling a canoe about halfway across North America (from New York City to northern Manitoba), he settled in Northwest Ontario for nearly 10 years, where he began honing his passions for writing, woodworking and sustainable forestry. Over the years, he's built snowshoes, workbenches, canoes and log cabins, and in the mid-1980s, he landed a gig as a book editor at the Taunton Press in Connecticut (publishers of Fine Woodworking). That led him to research and write the definitive volume on the history, design and construction of the woodworking workbench (The Workbench Book, Taunton Press, 1987), followed shortly thereafter by The Workshop Book, and many related essays and articles. It was during his research for the Bench and Shop books that Scott bumped into Todd and John Curtis through their mutual friend and colleague, the fabled luthier, Richard Schneider, of Sequim, Washington. Scott and Todd shared a motel room at the Guild of American Luthier's convention in Vermillion, South Dakota, where Todd popped the question he and John had been ruminating: If Luthiers Mercantile paid the transportation, could Scott interest Fine Woodworking in an article about the Palcazu project in the Peruvian Amazon, a world-famous experiment in tropical forest management? Scott and John set aside Peru's hyper-inflation and the threat of the Shining Path guerrilla movement, which would soon tear that country apart for most of a decade. They traversed the Andes by small plane and landed on a rocky beach in the Amazonian rainforest to document the first export shipment of a container of mixed tropical wood species, to be purchased and distributed by Luthier's Mercantile and John Shipstad of the Sonoma County Woodworkers Association. That trip turned into the Fine Woodworking* article, "Managing a Rain Forest" (FWW, May/June 1990), and led directly to their founding (with marquetry expert Silas Kopf and others) of the Woodworkers Alliance for Rainforest Protection (WARP). GreenWood grew out of a field project to train chairmakers in Honduras, which was initiated by Curtis Buchanan and Brian Boggs in 1993, under the auspices of WARP. The rest, as they say is history—and there's a lot of it! As Scott says about the Yale Innovation Prize, received by GreenWood last February: "Having an innovative idea is cool, but it's only the first step. Keeping at it day after day and year after year—forging partnerships along the way—that's what makes innovation real." GreenWood website: www.greenwoodglobal.org