[saymaListserv] Cut UN-recycled paper

[Tim Johnson]

Thanks, Bill. Also, let's not forget the order of priority -- reduce, re-use, recycle (in that order): reducing use of paper (e.g. cloth bags, electronic newsletters, smaller fonts for letters, etc.), re-using (saving one-sided paper to use the back), then recycling.

CIsland at aol.com wrote:Friends of SAYMA and Chattanooga Meeting, 
 
Your YM Ecological Concerns Network committee, in the Representative Meeting at Atlanta last Seventh Day, proposed that the Yearly Meeting adopt the practice of using only 100% postconsumer recycled chlorine-free processed paper.  One of the questions that arose in the ensuing discussion suggested that there might be little, if any, net environmental benefit in the use of recycled paper as compared to using paper made directly from harvested trees.  The reason for this suggestion was based on the view, expressed by the questioner himself, that the trees for making paper come from tree farms where trees are grown exclusively for making paper and that, after harvests on these farms, replacement trees are planted right away.  So, where is the problem with using UN-recycled paper?  He drew a parallel between recycling paper and trying to recycle corn because, in his expressed view, paper comes from farms where all the land does is grow trees just like all the land does in corn fields is
 grow corn.  This suggestion gave me pause but I responded rather tentatively that I thought the harvesting of trees for paper was not that simple.  I said maybe the full story is that old-growth mixed wood forests are clear cut to start the paper companies' tree farms.  
 
Surprisingly, back home after Atlanta, the mail waiting for me held the current issue of ONEARTH magazine with its cover bannering "3 Million Trees Gone in One Year, Tennessee's Chainsaw Massacre."  (Cover Story of the current issue, Winter,2004, volume 25, #4) The article is a report of an investigative journalism project made possible by grants from the Josephine Albright Patterson Fund for Investigative Journalism and the John Neu Family Foundation.  It is full of solidly documented factual descriptions of what has been, and continues to be, done to the forests of the Cumberland Plateau in eastern Tennessee.  
 
My suspicions were right.  This report tells the tale of "about 200,000 acres" of native wood forests being clearcut, i.e. raped of all their trees, on the Eastern Tennessee portion of the Cumberland Plateau alone.  All for the production of paper.  (It also tells the whole story about the paper companies, the loggers, the monetary enrichment to these 'players,' the destruction of habitat of hundreds of species of wild and plant life, the fowling of our water supply, the devastating consequences of monoculture in former mixed woodlands, the devastation from chemicals sprayed over the land, etc.)  The tale includes recent history about the increasing rate at which forests are being destroyed for tree farms and the prospect that the rate will increase even more in the future.  These facts engender an image of a future when the yet remaining healthy, full-of-life woodlands with the rich abundance of species variety are all stripped bare and empty of any life; destroyed by erosion, pine
 beetles, unnatural chemicals, etc., and not even able to sustain tree farms.

(This article is an excellent example of good investigative journalism because 'the players' in the paper industry do their best to conceal the facts of the destruction of our forests and woodlands.  The report also documents their efforts to conceal and deceive.)  
 
Bottom line: Cutting the use of UN-recycled paper products is VERY IMPORTANT!  (And, what makes it even more important is the reduction in burning fossil fuels whose emissions are also destroying major other aspects of our home planet's environment as well as causing increased disease in humans.)
 
In hopes of increasing Peace/Shalom and Justice in the world, including our own homeland,  Bill Reynolds

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Love & truth, agape & satyagraha, Tim

Tim Johnson, e-mail: timinathens at yahoo.com

"Love is a verb." -- Stephen Covey


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