TEN YEARS AFTER - January, 2008

In March, 1998 I drove from Chetumal, Mexico, into Belize, Central America, blown away by the extent of the deforestation I had observed all over southern Mexico.

Thousands upon thousands of square miles of what was jungle the last time I was in the region in 1973, had been reduced by chainsaws and cattle grazing to something looking like concrete slab that couldn’t even support a cover crop of weeds twenty-five years later.

Until then I hadn’t ‘bought’ global warming because I didn’t believe human actions had the power to transform the climate of something so vast as our planet.

But seeing the aftermath of such destruction I understood that six billion people going on nine, trying to live the life to which we all aspire while using the same hydro-carbon fuel mix we use now would make living that life impossible.

Of course, witnessing wholesale habitat destruction does not prove global warming. I had an intuition, like Paul on the road to Damascus, the truth of which only time can prove.

But to be fair, Nobel laureate vice-presidents notwithstanding, science has not absolutely ‘proved’ that the rise in concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide is caused by humans and neither has it proved that the shorter winters we all have observed are caused by that rise.

However, the preponderance of evidence runs so heavily in that direction that not to take ANY steps to ameliorate the likely consequences of what look to be very big changes is, to say the least, incautious, if not downright foolhardy.

As it is, regardless of our opinions about ‘climate change’, the real threat to our way of life is the accelerating, planet-wide loss of biodiversity because of habitat destruction due to human population pressure. This is what is going to sneak up and bite us on the rump.

Lost species cost us medicines undiscovered, rare genotypes that won’t be bred into potential food crops and, if we knock enough pieces out of the Web of Life, there exists the very real possibility of eventually killing off the biosphere altogether along with the oxygen it provides free of charge.

By the time I got to Belize City I was consumed with the strongly felt need to plant trees, to reforest the ravaged land, but without the least idea of how I might go about it.

Until I ran into my old friend, Marta.

Back in the summer of ‘69 Marta’s husband, Antonio, had given me a lift out of Guatemala’s Sierra de las Minas to the town of el Estor, where they lived, on the shore of Lake Izabal.

After they fed me supper I spent the night on their floor and, thanking them profusely, I left the next morning on my way to the ruins at Copan, in Honduras, never thinking I’d lay eyes on them again.

Yet there was Marta, twenty-nine years later and despite all expectation, running a waterfront gasoline station in a very tough section of Belize City.

That day he’d picked me up in ‘69, since we never spoke anything but Spanish, I assumed Antonio was Guatemalan when he was, it turned out, a British Honduran employed in Guatemala by a Canadian mining company.

They had met in British Honduras when Marta, who was Guatemalan, attended high school there, and, after Antonio parted ways with his Canadian employer, they had returned to his home to start a business and raise their growing family.

However, Antonio had suffered a fatal heart attack just two months before I showed up and Marta and her two daughters, who helped her run the place after he died, were already starting to get robbed.

Not surprisingly, they were open to considering doing something else and over meals at their house we hatched the idea of making dog beds, not entirely out of the blue.

In 1996, after buying a series of disappointing beds for a girlfriend’s elderly labrador retriever, I felt like I had discovered a real need and, hence, a business opportunity and so, over several months’ time, taught myself to sew well enough to be able to experiment with several dog bed designs.

I also discovered how hard the work is and how far I was from being able to turn out a commercially acceptable piece of goods and so, yet another of my ‘great ideas’ bit the dust.

But I still had the heavy duty single needle machine and a very fancy five cone Juki overlock, both mounted in commercial tables, sitting at home gathering dust. Marta had the space and refugees from all over Central America were stacked up right there in Belize City with the necessary skills and who needed the work.

I shipped my two machines and denim, muslin, zipper, thread and fiber content tags from Port Everglades and then went down myself to cut patterns. We started making three sizes of round, gusseted, indigo denim dog beds in June of 1999.

Not quite a year later, with inventory stacking up and the first website, having cost six thousand dollars, a total washout, I had just started talks with a new web development company, when Marta was diagnosed with breast cancer.

In short order she lost her lease on the gas station and suddenly landed up in the dog bed business full time.

While I debated what to do (all the while shelling out for the development of the new website), I was bumbling around, happily distracted, in the jungle in southern Belize.

I was befriended there by a group of Mopan Maya, men who taught me to recognize mahogany seeds and seedlings and who agreed, for a modest fee, to harvest mahogany seeds and to start them and it wasn’t long before I was planting trees.

But when it became evident following her surgery that the chemotherapy would soon exhaust Marta’s savings I realized that, website or not, I had to turn dog bed inventory into cash and so by July of 2000 I was flogging dog beds on eBay.

Remember Y2K? What a simple world we lived in then, back before 9/11.

Sadly, the Federal Reserve, having jacked up interest rates by six and a half percent over the prior eighteen months, hammered that world into coming unglued in a quick hurry and fourteen months later, in a well-timed attempt at finishing us off, 9/11 slammed us to our knees, the stock market plunged and our economic life nearly came to a halt.

Our Government, however, exhorted us to spend and spend we did. And our Government spent aggressively right along with us, borrowing large sums via Treasury auctions (the budget surplus evaporated in the Fed induced recession in 2000) from our own citizens and also from, among many others, the Chinese government (lent to make certain we could afford to keep on buying their goods), and our economy although badly staggered kept most all of us employed and we managed to dodge that fatal bullet of ‘the loss of consumer confidence’ and the great game of getting and spending kept rolling.

Through all the turmoil, Victoria Peak dog beds continued to make new friends but by 2003 Marta was dead and her second round of chemo and the course of radiation treatments which followed it had left me insolvent, not to mention very sad.

Shutting down crossed my mind but so many old customers were coming back, replacing Victoria Peak dog beds that had served well for years with new ones, that I finally grasped what all the lovely notes from happy customers, about how much they and their dogs loved my dog beds, really meant.

I had actually pulled off the proverbial ‘better mousetrap’ and to allow having done right by my friend to be what took me down just felt wrong and I resolved that somehow or another Victoria Peak Trading Company would survive.

The bobbing and weaving got pretty creative (it’s amazing how much money they’ll let you borrow) but finally, forced to the wall, I had to dump my house in town, move to the Shenandoah Valley and start looking for a cutandsew contractor here in the United States.

Marta’s illness had made operating in Belize expensive but after her death other problems developed and since I couldn’t be full-time in Belize keeping production on track and also be selling that production in the US at the same time, though I regretted it terribly, I found myself with no alternative but to shut the Belize operation down.

To be truthful, despite using American made fabrics, zippers and thread, I had always felt semi-cheezy about making a product offshore to be sold here in the States. And although it was precisely the production’s ‘offshoreness’ that allowed me to explore and plant trees in the Maya Jungle, I stayed conflicted about it the entire time I manufactured in Belize.

As it turned out, as pleased as I was to be able to say, “Made in USA”, there was a price to be paid. Production costs doubled just as the flood of imported competition was cresting and by the middle of 2006 the financial situation got so dire that anything not contributing directly to the production and distribution of dog beds ‘went over the side’.

Along with having to drop the hosting of a global warming website, I haven’t traveled outside the country in over two years and I’ve had to accept that the trees I planted will be looking after themselves for the foreseeable future.

For now, unless the national real estate bellyflop gets worse which it well may, the worst appears to be over. Sales are up a tad in general and the numbers for Christmas ‘07 represent a healthy improvement over last year. A leaner, tougher Victoria Peak Trading Company is still in the game.

So what’s next?

Sales are still nothing to write home about and profitability remains elusive, so the first order of business has to be more and better marketing.

Dogs and their humans love Victoria Peak dog beds once they have the goods in hand, just not enough dogs know about them. I have a marketing plan, already afoot in a small way and already showing some small signs of success, so further efforts along those lines will be made.

Once the cash flow picks back up, the next step would be to return to Central America and get back to planting trees. For now, you’ll find a discussion of some of my thoughts on that subject on the Plant a Tree page.

When Jared Diamond and E. O. Wilson are both wringing their hands over the threat of an ‘extinction bottleneck’ in the next twenty or thirty years, ignoring them would be extremely unwise. What these Pulitzer Prize winning scientists are worried about is the potential scenario where we wind up losing the entire planetary ecosystem. Habitat is key.

Wildlife habitat is under pressure everywhere. Global warming, whatever the truth of it may be, will only make the effects of that pressure worse and many more species whose existence is totally dependant upon their natural environment will inch closer to joining the hundreds of others that we humans have already driven to extinction.

We all need to conserve, promote and plant habitat wherever we can but, because the neotropics are so species diverse, reconstructed habitat there gets a lot more bang per buck.

Since 1999 Victoria Peak Trading Company together with our customers (the seedling and planting expenses were all paid for with funds derived from dog bed sales) have planted not quite nine hundred indigenous tropical hardwood trees in Belize. In the course of that process I have learned enough about jungle horticulture to know how to do very much more and with much better efficiency.

Your purchase of one or a few of the most comfortable, durable, and user friendly dog beds on the planet will enable me to get back to doing it. Thank you!