Happy New Year! Here we are nearly at the beginning of 2008 and the close of the 2007 tax year. In the US, we are in the midst of a presidential campaign. Unfortunately as most people in the world have witnessed thorough the stupidity of the current administration, the choices we will make in this election have global implications. We are also poised on the edge of global environmental challenges on an epic scale. In honor of the income tax we pay each year in the US, I’ll go right off the deep end. Woodworkers aren’t supposed to know anything about taxes, right?

In order to make the necessary changes in the American economy to facilitate environmental responsibility, it is important to engage in the systematic replacement of the income tax with a system of taxation that fully addresses the depletion of the world’s resources by rampant irresponsible consumerism. You can take the world’s resources and make things of lasting high quality, or you can waste those very same resources making useless junk and trash. By taxing the use and disposal of resources you put the burden of sustaining government where it belongs, on those whose actions diminish the future for our children and grandchildren. So in the common sense woodworker’s approach to taxes, I suggest that we tax the use of materials and the disposal of those materials, thereby pushing the American economy to grow as an expression of environmental responsibility instead of consumerism.

Taxation of labor has direct bearing on the expression of quality and skill in the American workforce. The income tax on individuals applies pressure for faster, less attentive workmanship, while concurrently pushing the American workman to settle for cheaper low quality imported goods.

And so exactly where does woodworking come in? Robert Rodale, former director of Rodale Press, Organic Gardening, Prevention and American Woodworker Magazines offered what some thought to be a bizarre hypothesis before his death in a car accident in Russia in 1990. Imagine, 1990? It would be at least another 17 years before George W. Bush would warm up his brain enough to admit the dangers of global warming. The idea proposed by Rodale was this: Wood is a carbon sink. Natural forests remove carbon dioxide from the environment. By building our homes from wood, and furnishing our homes in real wood, we extract carbon from the environment for as long as those carbon molecules are sequestered from decay. Build our homes to last and construct lasting high quality wooden furnishings and we have essentially prevented that carbon from adding to the intolerable levels of CO2 in the natural environment. Of course making things from wood is not a complete solution. Much more needs to be done, but in essence, woodworkers making high quality lasting goods could and should be paid carbon credits as long as the materials we use come from sources that do not put the environment at risk. Rustic furniture, anyone?

As you watch the presidential race and as we begin the New Year, watch to see if any candidates have the courage to address the current tax code. It is an abomination constructed by the special interests of consumerism. Those special interests sustain various candidates and it is hard for those candidates to find courage to propose change. So don't look for any actual changes to take place. And yet, I have hope that we are on the edge of an awakening that starts with the hands. As other parts of the environmental movement struggle to get a grip on the issues, the Wisdom of the Hands concept provides a handle, a place to get hold of things and begin lasting change.