Why can’t we do both – save paper (by using the blank sides), getting our bills online, using recycled paper, etc, AND plant new trees. We’ve pretty much turned the Eastern Woodlands – which stretched from the east coast of America to the Mississippi into farmland and prairie – within a couple hundred years. Why not plant trees where we can, reclaim some of that vast woodlands area, without harming agriculture tho.
BTW, they don’t use hardwood for paper. But here is something interesting. I saw this program some 20 years ago about mule-logging in private hardwood forests. It seems big machine logging does a lot of harm to the young trees and saplings, pretty much destroying the forest. The program showed how some landowners contracted with mule-logging outfits. They go in, cut down some mature trees with chainsaws, then chain them up to a mule, that drags them out to the open area near the road, where they use mule power to help load them onto their big trucks. It doesn’t seem as quick or efficient, but the young trees and saplings are virtually unharmed and then can grow into mature trees, to in the en and long-run it is a more efficient, less harmful way to do logging (but probably only for hardwood trees, which bring a much better price).
The reason I taped that program is I found it to be part of the AGW mitigation strategy – don’t destroy forests (which are carbon sinks), get what we need from them – what we really need, after all efforts at efficiency/conservation, reducing, reusing, recycling – and do it in a way that uses less fossil fuel energy.
Actually, hardwood is used in making paper.
ehow.com/list_6631895_species-trees-used-make-paper_.html
It’s interesting that in pre-Columbian U.S., much of what we think of as “endless primeval forests” were actually “orchards”. Indians thinned trees, eliminated some, and planted varieties (particularly nut producers) that were useful to them. There were huge areas of cleared land in the eastern U.S. before the first white settlers. In Georgia, for instance, the American Chestnut was far and away the most common tree until disease essentially wiped them out. The otherwise curious presence of fruiting trees (many from elsewhere) in the Amazon Basin have led to the conclusion by some that the area was “garden-like” before European diseases wiped out most of the tending populations there.
I was amused to read, not too long ago, that “native pecans” in my own Ozark region, which the Forest Service prized and tended carefully, were actually brought here by Indians from Texas by way of Oklahoma long ago.
But that’s not to say no attention should be given to interspersing agriculture with silvoculture today, and in my opinion it deserves a great deal more attention than it is commonly given. It may be observed, however, that there is an increasing recommendation of it on the part of university agriculture departments.
It has been my observation that most farmers and ranchers do care about the enrivonments in which they operate. After all, they are obliged to live in them too.
However, there is almost zero encouragement of it in any economic way, let alone as a public policy issue. Improvements like silvoculture (or “mob grazing” in paddocks for that matter) are costly to farmers and do not promise immediate return in the same way crops do. If the creation of massive “heat sinks” through desertification is threatening to the environment (and it may be greatly more so than CO2 emissions) and human life, then perhaps governments would be wiser not to worry about things like CAFE standards that would have almost no impact on emissions or “money for pollution swaps” like “cap and trade”, but to encourage practices that would actually have a favorable impact on the environment as well as on the totality of resources available for human use.
An interesting thing about the environment is that, while there have been massive environmental improvements in the U.S. in the last decades (including in emissions, which have been essentially flat for a long time) it is not realistic to ask the rest of the world to, e.g., curb carbon emissions when the price of doing so is a reduction in their economic prospects. If one looks at China, for instance, a horribly polluted environment is a price they are obviously willing to pay for better living standards. We can say all we want about emissions, but they pay absolutely no attention, and won’t.
On the other hand, some things actually might be adopted by others if we are able to demonstrate that they produce tangible benefits. Desertification is, for example, a terrible problem in China, and it’s getting worse. But China can’t point to economic benefits from desertification. If we have any expectation of influencing others in the world to adopt more environmentally friendly policies, we have to demonstrate that they’re economically beneficial here. We could do that, but we don’t. Instead, our policymakers insist on policies that adversely impact the economies of individuals and the country as a whole, and vainly expect that somehow others on this planet will follow suit.
