High Crime on the High Line: Why Is NYC's Highest-Profile Park Using Amazon Wood?

If a tree falls in the Amazon, will anyone in New York City hear it?

What about if hundreds, perhaps thousands, of trees fall, and are then exported to Gotham's highest-profile park?

That question has kept me up for many nights after I strolled along the High Line, located in New York's infamous meat packing district, on opening day.

First, I was wowed by the innovative recovery of urban space, by the tastefully rusted bones of an old elevated railroad trestle sprouting native grasses and pedestrian throughways.

Then my stomach flipped. It was the furniture. More specifically, the wood. I didn't see the growth rings that usually mark wood logged from temperate forests, which meant that this wood likely came from under the perpetually moist canopy of a rain forest.

Turns out, Friends of the High Line, the group that masterminded the park, built all the chaise lounges, benches, bleacher seating and decking with tropical hardwood ripped from the jungles of the Amazon.

Friends' wood of choice, ipê, grows throughout the Amazon at an average of 1 to 2 trees per acre; well-funded loggers bulldoze a virtual ant farm of roads to chase down these scattered trees.

In the Amazon, the consumption of export -- quality wood, including ipê, is the primary factor leading to deforestation -- mostly because logging roads open up previously inaccessible areas of forest to land speculators, cattle ranchers and farmers.

To make matters worse, according to the Brazilian government, 80 percent of logging in the Amazon is done illegally. And the heavily armed criminal cartels doing this logging also have a nasty record of stealing land from indigenous people and killing those who get in their way. Illegal loggers are even known to employ slave laborers, as reported in an exposé by investigative reporters from Knight-Ridder.

Unfortunately, when it comes to materials used in New York City's public infrastructure, Friends' preferences are far from unique. Tim Keating, executive director of Rainforest Relief, an environmental watchdog group, said that during the 1960s, the city's Department of Parks and Recreation began using tropical woods for renovations to 10-plus miles of coastal boardwalks.

By the mid-80s, multiple city agencies were, in his words, "on tropical forest feeding frenzy." They imported rain forest wood not just for all the boardwalks, but also for the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge and tens of thousands of park benches, subway track ties, and pilings along the Staten Island Ferry terminals (each piling is a single tree from old-growth Guyanese rain forest).

While Keating boasts that his group has stopped more tropical wood imports to North America than any other environmental organization, he's found New York City to be an especially tough nut to crack.

Still, there have been some successes, most of them quite recent.

In 2007, the Department of Parks and Recreation finally vowed to spare "approximately 390 square miles of rainf orest every 20 years" by using concrete and recycled plastic in place of tropical hardwood for city boardwalks. They claim that these materials "may last up to five times longer than traditional wooden boardwalks, with little or no maintenance, saving the city time and money in the long run."

This year, the Department of Transportation ordered five pilings composed of recycled plastic lumber to test in the fenders of the Staten Island Ferry. As well, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has acknowledged that "it is possible, as some have alleged" -- the "some" being Rainforest Relief -- "that New York City is one of the leading consumers of tropical hardwoods in the nation." Even if Bloomberg is short on solutions, at least he's addressing the problem, which is more than can be said for Friends of the High Line.