Growing up I was always told not to waste paper because of the poor trees that had to die to make it. I was told that the Amazon rainforests were being chopped up to make our books, and I should think of the poor widdle animals losing their homes because of us.
If this is true, are the rainforests seeing the benefit of this? Are we chopping down less trees then before due to less demand for paper? Will the internet save the trees, or are they now being chopped down for other reasons anyway?
'Cause no way would they grow by themselves.:rolleyes:
To the OP: It is by no means clear that the internet, and digitization of data in general, is leading us to use less paper, but even if it were, it would not affect the rainforest. Paper is not made from those sorts of trees.
I was under the impression that rain forests were being cleared not for paper (or at least not just for paper), but rather to use the land for agricultural or other uses. If that’s true, then cutting your paper use won’t matter to the rain forests.
Rainforest loss is (mostly) driven by the interests of people who live near the rainforests. An area of forest will be cut down all at once to allow access to minerals under it, or a couple of trees will be removed to expand someone’s farm or plantation (multiplied by there being a lot of farmers). I have no statistics on hand to prove this, but I firmly believe that the one-tree-at-a-time little nibblings cause more cumulative forest destruction over a year than any of the big deforestation projects.
The trees harvested for export are mostly the hardwood mahoganies and suchlike, and those are no tused for pulp. Paper is, I understand, mostly made from fast-growing northern pines and other softwoods.
I am skeptical about claims that the world is going paperless. I know in my office that the ease of printing means we have more hard-copies of everything. Back in the day we would see one copy of an announcement on the bulliten board; today the same memo is emailed to everyone, and three-quarters of the workers print a copy for themselves.
That’s exactly it. Imagine I own a bunch of woodlands. I can get a respectable annual income forever by harvesting trees and selling them for pulp wood. If that income source disappears, am I going to just swallow the loss and keep paying my taxes, or am I going to cut all the trees down, lay out roads and sell it for development? Tree farmers are in it for the cash. If there’s no money in wood, there’s plenty in quarter acre lots.
Well that will depend on what laws and planning regulations are in place, won’t it. Naked capitalism will destroy the environment eventually whatever the technology. Fortunately, however, we do not live in libertopia.
Clearly you don’t actually own a bunch of woodlands that any developers are realistically interested in. Because there’s just no comparison between the tiny income per acre from pulpwood production compared to the real payday of selling it for quarter-acre lots. Seriously, pulpwood prices could go up by 10 or 100 times and it still wouldn’t factor into the decision whether to sell to developers or not. So dropping prices certainly won’t affect anything.
Pulp wood is generally grown in God-forsaken backwoods that nobody wants to live in (like Maine far from the coasts). If we stop using the trees to make paper, nobody is going to build suburbs there. The trees will just keep growing, with a little more diversity of tree species as the forest matures (though probably fewer deer and moose, since they really like clearings and re-growing forests, and more animals that like mature forests).
Anyway, I understood that computerization of offices initially led to more paper use, since it was so easy print things and people were still used to working with paper (so people would print out every single draft after the tiniest changes, and they’d print every e-mail and put it in a file, etc.). But that paper use has been declining more recently, as organizations and people figure out how to actually do things in a paperless way.
Plus the fact that tree farms are often in inaccessbile areas unsuitable for food farming or development, like the highlands of Scotland and Norway. If you don’t grow trees there, it’s hard to know what else to do with the land.
Your statement implies paper producers don’t care about the environment. Mead Corp. owns thousands of acres of timberland in Ohio and Indiana, and is a good steward of the environment. See this and this.
I hunted deer on land owned by Mead Corp. in SE Ohio for many years. I saw (firsthand) acres and acres of seedlings planted by Mead. Trust me, they take care of their land.
I’ve heard this too. But in my anecdotal observations, it’s not true. People print out one-sentence emails all the time. Has anybody got factual info on this?
Yes, over the last decade there are frequent news stories about pulp-and-paper plants in northern Ontario closing due to poor markets. Newspapers (a big consumer) are fewer and smaller that the Good Old Days.
But again, the ideal pulp is trees too small for real lumber - although that may be changing, since much of the larger boards in home construction over the last decade or two are ebing replaced by contructed chip-board. Where floor joists used to be 2x8 or 2x10, they are now I-beams of 2x3 caps with a chip-plywood core about 8 inches wide. Perhaps this is an example of technology replacing diminishing resources.
Pulp companies used to be notorious polluters - now they are just common polluters. The old process involved using mercury to extract some of the chemicals from the process; apparently a lot of it flushed out the waste into the rivers used for cleaning and cooling; some rivers in northern Ontario have real mercury issues.
Even when the large trees are cut for lumber the sort of litter that used to be left in the forest or pushed up into large piles to be burned in a ‘slash burn’ are now hauled out and chipped up for paper.
Some fairly large trees and stumps used to be left and made available for people cutting fire wood for personal use, not anymore, it all goes into chip trucks and heads to the paper mill. What used to be left to burn or rot now goes to the mill.
In North America forest practices are heavily regulated and great progess has been made in the last few decades.
The situation in South America is a tragedy because some of those old growth hardwoods are not suitable for tree farming and may not recover.
Most of our house hold income comes from paper. Please remember to wipe your ass more often. Thank you.