In 2017, a French auctioneer sold a 200-year-old violin bow made by François Xavier Tourte, regarded as the Antonio Stradivari of bow-making, for a record €576,000 ($687,000). Tourte was among the first to make consistent use of a raw material that is still prized today for the best bows: pernambuco, or brazilwood. A modern orchestra is a thicket of dancing brazilwood sticks.

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And that’s a problem. Logging, urban sprawl and ranching have shrunk Brazil’s Atlantic forest, the tree’s habitat, to an eighth of its former area. The number of wild trees has dropped by four-fifths in less than a century. CITES, an international agreement, has restricted trade in brazilwood products since 2007.

But Brazil’s government wants CITES to list the trees among the most endangered species, giving

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