CSotD: The Sustainable Keith Knight
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In today's Knight Life, Keith Knight seems poised to leap into an unnecessary future.
There are any number of reasons to resist the siren song of the new, and probably as many to embrace it. But the "dead trees" mantra needs to stop being a mantra and become, instead, a discussion.
Beginning with a different phrase that was once very hip but that I don't hear as often anymore:
Don't Panic
Back about a decade ago, a friend put some innocuous dish on the table for dinner only to have one of her kids break into tears because she was convinced that, if she ate beef, she would get mad cow disease and die on the spot.
The issue being not BSE (bovine spongebob encephalluseffigy), but JRAS (juvenile risk assessment syndrome).
Knowledge is power, but answers aren't always binary, and kids love binary answers: "Yes" is okay, "No" is also okay, "It depends" means you have to do some homework and therefore is not okay.
You will note that people do not always outgrow the effects of JRAS.
In the case of eating beef, there are any number of reasons not to, including overuse of hormones and antibiotics, barbaric feedlot practices and inefficiency of land use.
Not only is BSE not high on the list of rational concerns, but the other matters can be addressed. And if you want to not eat beef in the meantime, that's cool.
Or if you find you feel healthier without it, that's also cool.
And if you want to keep eating it but not because it's a flawless product of an industry with no need for monitoring or improvement, that's cool, too.
Talk about dead trees falls into the same category: It's right to be concerned about waste, but it's stupid to think that paper production means the death of the Amazon rain forest.
It's also stupid not to. Sort of.
There was a large, international paper company that was chopping down the rain forest over in Indonesia to make paper, including fast food packaging for KFC and a couple of other chains, though the supplies they were making were only being used over on that side of the globe.
So it wasn't the Amazon, but, still, while the paper may have been used regionally, the damage was global. And tres uncool.
There appears to have been a happy ending, and it came about through corporate pressure, spurred by public pressure. That's good.
But the idea that use of paper means cutting down old growth hardwood remains nonsense, because the bulk of paper doesn't come from those sources and because there is value in paper if you're not stupid about how it is made, used and, as necessary, disposed of.
One of the stops in my oft-cited student tours of the newspaper was the rolls of newsprint set out for the next day's paper. And I'd tell them what each roll weighed and how long a paper carpet you could make if you rolled out all the rolls for a single day in a straight line, because kids, and especially little boys, love numbers.
And then I'd use those wow-numbers to tell them how important it was to recycle their newspapers. If our tiny paper could lay down a carpet from Plattsburgh to Ticonderoga every day, imagine what the Boston Globe, NYTimes or Wall Street Journal was producing.
Our newsprint was, depending on the supplier, something over 50 percent recycled fiber, generally closer to 2/3's than half.
I'd explain that 100 percent recycling would be hard because with each pulping, the fibers get broken up more and as they become shorter, the tensile strength of the resulting paper goes down, so that, for paper that has to move through a press ("web printing"), there is a point at which you would start having tears and, not only is the stoppage time-consuming and costly, but re-webbing wastes paper.
100 percent recycled paper usually shows up in sheet-fed printed products, and thicker pieces like placemats, menus and boxes.
And fresh pulp is a good thing because it's good to have jobs in the timber industry and softwood pulp can be farmed just like corn. It takes longer to mature the crops on a tree farm, but we're not talking about the General Sherman. Paper is quite sustainable.
What's more, pressure to ensure sustainability can work, and not just in massive, grotesque situations like the Indonesian case.
A few years ago, one of the mills in an area I covered lost their contract to provide paper for the LL Bean catalog, not because their paper was not sustainably produced, but because it wasn't certified as sustainable.
What I found interesting at the time was that nobody seemed to feel it was unfair. "We still lead in sustainable forestry practices, but we have fallen behind in the certification practices," the Verso spokesperson conceded.
And the more I covered the timber side of the paper industry, the more I found that sustainability was not viewed as burdensome. Loggers were not only aware of a difference between taking all the mature trees in a section versus "clear cutting" where you strip out everything, but were also aware of things like "vernal ponds" and the importance of preserving biomass in the form of salamanders and turtles and such.
Most of what they resented was ignorant, hostile, outsider blanket accusations about "dead trees" and destroying the rain forest.
Oh, and they also resented having to pay taxes for new landfill space. Recycling keeps that within reasonable limits, too.
Anyway, Keefe, if you want to keep drawing on paper, please do. Look for a sustainability seal on the packaging.
If you are selling your originals, they probably won't end up in the landfill anyway, and you won't run into Sergio if you're sitting at home doodling away on a Wacom.
The Green Knight
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