Tree for all: The global campaign to protect the world's forests

They say that great oaks from small acorns grow, but not even a supreme optimist would have imagined that a global green movement was at its inception when a group of environmentalists gathered beside an oak tree on a cold damp November morning in Cheshire's Tatton Park a few years back.

They were there to launch a project they were calling "onetree", through which a 170-year-old oak, in an area of woodland grazed by red deer, would be felled and its parts distributed to demonstrate how every one - right down to the leaves and sawdust - had a value to craftspeople, furniture-makers and artists.

The results took time to materialise - after milling, the oak needed months of aeration - but it was worth the wait. A superb exhibition of products included such items as furniture, paper, leather (tanned in oak-bark liquor) and bacon (using sawdust to smoke the hams). Perhaps because the exhibition did not reach London (it travelled to Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden and Nottinghamshire's Harley Gallery after Tatton), onetree commanded little national attention in the UK. But The New York Times saw the point. The exhibits, it said, spoke of "a confidence in British craftsmanship which inspires the viewer to think about their attitudes to the natural world."

And that might have been that for the two British furniture-makers and environmentalists whose idea this was - Garry Olson and Peter Toaig - had Canada not also become entranced by the concept. Looking for a way of celebrating the cherished cedars and maples of British Columbia, Canada launched its own project, acknowledging its debt to Olson and Toaig. There was a little unintentional one-upmanship (it was called "Two Trees"), and the project had a distinctly Canadian twist, with a cedar kayak and maple root sculptures amid the creative mix. But the effects were just as powerful, and a half-hour documentary on national television suggested the country was absorbed by the idea.

Last year, Nicaragua seized the idea for its own Un Arbol project, and it was at this stage that the WWF was alerted to it as a powerful vehicle for highlighting the importance of preserving the valuable Central American hardwood forests. A WWF report had just found that our thirst for timber made the UK the biggest importer of illegal wood in the EU, and that 28 per cent of the timber arriving here came from trees that should still be standing.

The result is the first WWF-sponsored onetree project, Un Arbol Bolivia, which showcases the products of a 30m-high jequitiba tree - leaves, seeds, bark, trunk, branches, roots and sawdust - in Guarayos near Santa Cruz. The tree has been reshaped by some of Bolivia's best-known furniture designers, architects, sculptors and even violin-makers - some from forest-based indigenous communities. It is hoped the project will inspire both industrial and domestic consumers.

The WWF has had its work cut out protecting the hardwoods in Bolivia, where broadleaf mahogany trees that once fetched up to £100,000 are now commercially extinct. A report last year by the Natural Resource Defense Council in the US said that tens of thousands of tons of mahogany were heading to the US to meet demand for luxury dining-room tables, household trimmings and even car dashboards.

In response, the WWF has helped establish the world's largest Forest Stewardship Council project in Bolivia, which ensures that logging across 2.2 million hectares is not detrimental to water, land, flora and fauna. Yet that constitutes only 16 per cent of the 53 million hectares of forest land in a country where the logging industry now sustains 60,000 jobs. The commercial pressures are intense, and forests are constantly being cleared for agriculture and cattle ranching and other industries.

Playing a direct role in the preservation of Central American forests is the last thing Olson expected when he got the project under way with Toaig, with whom he had worked for six years out of a workshop in Wilmslow, Cheshire. "We staged a couple of exhibitions a year in which we tried to break away from high-street cabinet-making," he says. "We liked to show off the splits and knots and get closer to the wood. It was Peter's idea to take a whole tree and invite people to be part of an exhibition." The aim was to show off wood's versatility and to raise awareness about sustainability. (Olson, a native Australian, uses predominantly British woods in his workshop and his North American imports of cherry, black walnut and maple are from managed plantations.)

When it came to selecting the tree, the pair were offered a number of unfelled dead specimens, but they were determined that it should be a live one, and that they should not shy away from the value of commercial plantations. "Some might have thought that a bit controversial but we simply wanted to show that you can grow a tree for commercial use without denuding the environment," Olson says. "The tree we selected would have been sold to a sawmill anyway, and it was felled in such a way that it did not bring any others down with it. The same principle is running through the Bolivian project."

Nor was there any sense of dead wood about the 50 exhibits, which emerged from a shortlist of 180 applicants who wanted to be involved. Furniture maker John Coleman's "Obi, chair", which drew on Japanese imagery, is now in mass production, as are the chairs Robin Day designed for the Tatton oak, whose vertical turned legs echo the forms of the stems of trees. "Sustainability and profitability can co-exist," says Olson.

Meanwhile, designer Lorna Green twisted twigs into rocking-chair slats and Thomas Hawson turned logs into a cherry-picker ladder. Paula McNamara used thin slices of wood to make a jacket with overlapping scales and Julienne Dolphin-Wilding contributed Barking Mad chairs (with backs covered with bark) and a jigsaw puzzle with 177 pieces. Mike Dodd added sawdust to ceramic glazes to create smoke-brown pots.

There is just as much invention among 76 participants who have worked on the jequitiba (Cariniana estrellensis) in Bolivia. Leticia Garcia has produced masks which combine the tree's bark with a ceramic glaze made from the ash produced by burning the wood. Artist Armando Landivar contributes a life-size sculpture of a "dreaming musician" from one of the tree's natural buttresses, and Hugo Landivar adds to the wide variety of chairs the project has already spawned. "I am very excited by the idea of having the opportunity to create, based on this beautiful and extraordinary tree," said artist Cecilia Lampo, another contributor. "It talks to me of past and present, as well as building for our future." Olson and Toaig have been invited to attend the exhibition and Olson will present a seminar on furniture design at a local university in Santa Cruz.

The WWF also has its eyes set on onetree projects in Colombia and Peru, where logging problems are even more pronounced. In southern Peru, for example, there is recent evidence that logging is displacing indigenous Indians and uncontacted peoples in lands set aside for them within the Tahuamanu rainforest.

But the ripples from what, in retrospect, seems like a momentous November day in Tatton Park are also still being felt in the UK. Acorns collected that day were planted by local schoolchildren and the saplings from the two which germinated have been replanted at Tatton by the National Trust. The £24,000 income generated by onetree - through the sale of exhibits and an accompanying book - has purchased trees for the new Mersey Forest in North-west England, Britain's least forested region. And, perhaps inevitably, another British onetree is also in the pipeline, with the chosen tree an ash from Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden.

Where does your wood come from?

* A report 15 months ago by WWF found 28 per cent of timber arriving in the UK comes from trees that should still be standing. Britain's imports of illegal wood are highest in the EU. Britain's total is 50 per cent higher than Germany's, almost double that of France and four times that of Spain.

* The EU imports heavily from five states or regions where there are grave concerns about sustainability: the Amazon basin, Russia, the Baltic states, the Congo basin, East Africa and Indonesia. The wood arrives as logs, plywood, or as finished products such as garden furniture. It is not illegal in Britain to import timber illegally logged abroad.

* Leading DIY chains such as Homebase and B&Q have a good record on selling products with the Forest Stewardship Council logo - a tree with a tick. But there are still many companies with chequered records.

* The EU imports around 45 per cent of all timber exported from the Amazon basin. France, the Netherlands and the UK account for the largest share of the region's exports to the EU. Sweden and the UK are the leading destinations for Baltic states' timber.

* For a database of FSC-registered products, see fsc.org.

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