"Nicholas B" wrote in message
...
Meranti...

Use it if you will. But remember that your boat is contributing to
deforestation in Borneo. Your pleasure... will be at someone's cost.

Nicholas

Well, you have a few alternatives. Meranti is just another name of a high
grade of Luan. At least luan is a fast growing family of species and is
rapidly being planted all around SE Asia. Then there is Okoume which comes
almost exclusively from Gabon. The Dutch, Israeli and Chinese logging
operations there are opening up primeval forest to settlement and are only
giving lip service to replanting. Mahogany is impossible to get any more.
There is always spruce and fir but the Shrub is opening up our national
forests to strip that out so that the oil companies can start drilling.
That leaves Southern yellow pine which makes a very poor and heavy boat
building wood.

So if you want to be an ecco-boatbuilder it boils down to using a vastly
inferior domestic pine plywood, a slightly better spruce and rip up our own
National Forests, a good light boat in okoume and help destroy the forests
in Gabon or use luan/meranti and let some SE Asians make an honest living
planting and harvesting trees.