Inside the cooperative's office, over cups of the faintly chocolaty coffee the island is known for, the farmers tick off the ways that the cooperative has changed their lives. Warma Samedi, chairman of KHJL, no longer worries that he'll be thrown in jail and leave his family destitute (Samedi spent three years as an illegal logger and now helps patrol the state forest as part of the co-op's watch program). Last year, he bought his first house, and he's paying for his three children to attend university. Abdul Rahman expanded his property to 20 acres and oversees the cooperative's largest teak nursery. He's hired a team of rice farmers, mostly women, to help him plant more than 100,000 seedlings, and he pays them each seven dollars a day. The women, in turn, pay day laborers three dollars a day to work the rice fields they've left behind (more than 50 percent of the Indonesian population earns less than two dollars a day).

Abdul Haris, chief of Lambakara village and past chairman of KHJL, credits the cooperative with building the confidence of community members. Now that they have experience negotiating with government officials and Javanese businessmen, "we can talk to anyone," he says. They've also acquired technological prowess, including using the Internet and GPS-mapping devices—skills they now teach their children. Samedi sums up the transformation: "I feel like I'm more knowledgeable, more educated," he says. "Before I only knew how to run, run, run."

The factory on Java that purchases much of the co-op's teak uses it to make garden furniture, mostly for the Dutch mega-store Kwantum. The demand for FSC-certified furniture—and the willingness to pay for it—is strongest in Europe, says the Tropical Forest Trust, though the call for so-called green timber is slowly catching on around the world. Still, only a small fraction of timber products sold in the United States carries an eco label.

Hotels are a significant market for fine wood (many of the luxury seaside resorts featured in this magazine's Gold List boast about their teak furnishings, for instance), yet hardly any seek out certified construction materials or furniture. Among the exceptions is Six Senses, which has 17 resorts in Asia and the Middle East and buys only furniture made of recycled or sustainably harvested wood products. Banyan Tree, another Asia-based hotel company well regarded for its social and environmental initiatives, does not have a wood-sourcing policy but, according to Michael Kwee, assistant director of the company's corporate social responsibility department, is moving in that direction. Closer to home, a smattering of small hotels incorporate sustainable wood into their decor and ethos, but neither the U.S. Green Buildings Council nor the FSC is aware of a single major American hotel chain that makes a point of buying only certified wood. Brian McGuiness, the Starwood vice president overseeing the launch of the company's new environmentally minded Element hotels (branded as eco-chic), calls the pursuit of certified wood furniture and materials "a challenging road," citing limited supply and premium prices. "You can find it, but it's going to cost you more," he says. But with legislation recently passed in Congress, hotels large and small may soon have bigger incentives to shop around for certified wood.