Chances are that some of your friends and business associates have a boilerplate at the bottom of their email that says something to the effect of: “think twice before printing this.” The use-less-paper crusade has caught on in the corporate world. Multinational electronics giant Toshiba has declared a “National No Print Day” in the United States on October 23, a public relations ploy complete with the dancing man in a tree costume you see pictured here. Closer to home, legislators in Albany have introduced several bills in the legislature aimed at curbing paper use according to this recent editorial.
Like most things in life, this issue is neither black nor white but solidly gray. On the one hand, bless people for wanting to conserve resources. In our consumer driven society, the ideas of thrift over waste shines. I don’t think anyone can argue that the vast majority of Americans would do well to use less of most everything, and as the crap piled in my garage attests, I’m certainly one of those Americans.
But on the other hand, in my mind, the save-the-planet-by-going-paperless crusaders don’t draw a clear enough distinction between the exploitive forest practices that are going on in some parts of the world and the responsible, important tree farming that’s going on around here. These working tree farms enrich communities, and when properly managed are good for the environment. Using locally produced resources is good. The fact that there’s a disconnect here is a great reminder to us that our tribe has to do a better job of getting the word out about this.
When I read this paragraph about rampant paper use in the editorial:
Whole forests are destroyed to comply with this quaint and, in this day and age, entirely unnecessary tradition. It’s a colossal and, frankly, shameful waste in a time when government is supposed to be more environmentally conscious.
I couldn’t help but wonder if the paper in the state office building in Albany was produced at the Finch Pruyn mill in Glens Falls. If so, the fiber in it potentially came from a section of my family’s woodlot in southwestern Vermont that’s nothing but deer-coppiced red maple and pasture pine, a squirrelly first-generation forest that grew back on overgrazed pastureland. By having a market for this wood, we’re improving the forest, not destroying it. And if it wasn’t my wood, there’s a good chance it came from the Adirondacks, as part of the fiber supply agreement between Finch and The Nature Conservancy and the State in that big land deal from a few years ago. Finch got out from under the carrying costs of the land and retained the rights to harvest a portion of it; TNC was able to conserve 161,000 acres in the heart of the Adirondacks, the forest products industry in the economically challenged north country got a life line, and people of New York and the whole Northeast now reap the benefits of having publicly accessible conserved forestland. I know some of the money stuff was controversial, and I’m sure not everyone was happy with the way the pie was divvied up, but in the big picture, it’s hard to argue that this wasn’t a good thing. So I hope there are Albany legislators who would connect their paper use with the 750 mill jobs in Glens Falls, the $30 million investment they made in the Adirondack Conservation Easement, and a quiet canoe ride down the upper reaches of the Hudson.
If there isn’t anyone making this connection, it could be that Finch doesn’t supply the paper to the capital. That they would makes logical sense, but the world’s not always logical. (The calls I have in to contacts at Finch haven’t been returned; I’ll update this post when they are.) Unfortunately, none of these lines are clean any more, given the global nature of the wood products business. We try to be sure that Northern Woodlands is printed on locally-sourced paper, but, to date, the best answer we have gotten is that it’s probably produced with Maine pulp at the Rumford mill, though there’s a chance it came from Escanaba, Michigan. And even then, since kraft pulp is a global commodity, trying to track where the wood came from that made a particular sheet of paper may not be possible anymore.
I was made aware of the editorial and the Toshiba campaign by the paper lobby, which is in damage control mode. They’re trumpeting their talking points: that paper is renewable and heavily recycled and doesn’t use energy like electronic devices, and supplies jobs, and there are more trees now than ever. And all of this is true, albeit filtered through industry bias. The problem is that none of these bullet points address the excess issue. You’ve got to at least concede that this is distasteful before the editor of a Staten Island newspaper, or a suburban state senator, is going to listen to you. And if, as an industry, you don’t have a clear supply chain that you can show consumers and politicians and any interested party where your paper comes from, then people are going to assume the worst about your product.
This is on all of us. The paper companies. The conservationists. The tree farmers. The environmentalists who believe that responsible management of local resources, and being accountable for your consumption habits are good things and infinitely more valuable to the environmental cause than a guy in a tree costume. We’ve all got to do a better job of communicating with one and other, and the world at large.
Discussion *