Not sure where to put this, but it is one of those random thoughts that I finally remembered to put down here.
Since the Bible is one ( if not the most) best seller of all time, it got me to wondering how many trees have been used in the printing of this book since the first one.
Anyone care to hazard a guess?
Buellar?
Well at a rough guess I’d say more than 20
There’s really no wya of knowing how many bibles have ever been produced.
[Booming voice from the sky]
I could tell you but then I’d have to smite you.
[bvfts]
Does that include paper Torahs and Tanakhs, too? What about the Apocrypha?
I’d like to know how many acres of forest were felled for all the Jack Chick tracts ever printed.
This fascinating page, How Much Information 2003, makes estimates about quantities of information in various categories.
It also has the useful number of 80,500, that being the number of pages that can be made from one tree.
If a Bible is 500 pages long, to give a convenient number, that’s 250 double-sized pages.
Therefore one tree can produce 322 bibles.
The next question is how many bibles have ever been printed. No one can possibly say, but lets throw out some order of magnitude estimates.
Current production of bibles is about 25,000,000 per year according to some estimate I once read. A good estimate? I don’t know. Covering what exact set of bibles? I don’t know. But it’s probably in the correct order of magnitude.
Bibles have been printed since 1455. Say 550 years. And the number printed started at a few hundred and have ramped up with time. Say 10,000,000 per year on average.
That’s a total of 5,500,000,000 bibles. Divide that by 322 and you get 17,080,745 trees.
Since that site estimate that 786,000,000 trees are needed for each years’ print paper needs, that’s an extremely tiny figure. About 8 days supply.
How large a forest is that?
This page gives a mid point estimate of about 400 trees per acre.
That gives us 42,702 acres or almost exactly one square miles of trees.
So, next time you open a bottle of Snapple you’re likely to see the “fact” that one square mile of forest would print all the bibles ever made.
Since they weren’t printed on paper for a long time, it makes you wonder how many sheep it took to get all the velum for the monks’ copies.
Darn.
Of course the number I had in my head was the number of square feet in an acre. And of course the number I wanted was the number of acres in a square mile. Which is 640.
So, redoing the calculation gives 66.7 sq. mi.
Still a trifling amount for 550 years.
The original question was How many forests have been de-tree’d since the printing of the Bible?
The answer is probably very few, since forests that produce the kind of wood used for book paper are generally re-planted to produce more paper in future years. The land owners treat their forests as a crop, just like corn or oats. Except that it takes years, rather than a few months, to produce a harvestable crop.
The major deforestation that as/is taking place on the world is when forests are cut down or burned to convert forest land into farming land, or suburban or urban housing land. This is permanent loss of forest land.
P.S. Many Bibles are printed on much nicer paper than run-of-the-mill printing paper. This is called ragstock, and contains a sizable percentage of rags (cloth) rather than wood pulp. And cloth comes not from forests, but from farmed crops (cotton, flax) or animal products (wool, etc.). Since those aren’t trees, no de-treeing involved.
The problems with that come from a diverse hardwood forest being replaced with a softwood grove that has about as much diversity as your average cornfield. You not only lose the old-growth timber, you also lose underbrush plants and a whole lot of habitat.
Rather more importantly, until the mid-nineteenth century, the paper used for printing did not use wood pulp at all, being made instead entirely from rags. Which further reduces any guesstimate.
But they don’t cut down a “diverse hardwood forest” for this! Paper mills don’t even want hardwood, they use softwood; and the hardwood is much more valuable to for furniture & construction lumber. Paper companies have their own ‘plantations’ of softwood groves, which they harvest just like farmers do cornfields.
The clear-cutting of old, diverse hardwood forests is not being done by paper companies, but by companies trying to convert forest land into farm or ranch land.
(Not that paper companies are too moral to do this. Or that they haven’t done it in the past. But now, it’s just better economically (cheaper) for them to get their wood pulp from their own softwood ‘plantations’.)