A Peeve
I've lately become rather irritated at seeing the helpful little notices on the paper napkin dispensers in coffeeshops and the more pretentious fast-food joints, asking patrons not to hog the napkins because "napkins = trees."
Grr.
Yes, paper napkins are made from wood pulp, and wood pulp is made from harvested trees. But: the idea that by not using napkins we are somehow Saving The Planet is idiocy.
Paper is made by paper mills, which buy their pulpwood from big forest-management companies, like Weyerhauser. Those companies own vast tracts of forest in the U.S. and Canada. Millions of acres. Harvesting trees is how forestry companies make money. So let's try a little thought experiment: suppose everyone in America decides that moral posturing is more important than clean hands, and consequently stops using paper napkins altogether. Paper prices collapse, and demand for pulpwood plummets.
What does Weyerhauser do with its millions of acres of trees? Continue to tend them lovingly, at considerable expense, despite the fact that those acres aren't generating as much revenue any more?
No. They would simply sell off those acres. (No sense in keeping capital tied up in worthless land, after all.) Nor will the buyers keep that land as forest, because they want some return on the money they've just used to buy it, and we've established that there's no demand for pulpwood. So the buyers will turn that land to other uses: farming, perhaps, or cattle-raising, or developing it as building lots. And for all those uses, the first thing they would do is cut down all the trees.
Congratulations, napkin-boycotters, you've just destroyed millions of acres of forest!
Now, I suspect most of those restaurants don't really give a tenth of a damn about the fate of the dear little trees. They're just trying to keep down their operating expenses and are using environmental guilt to keep the customers from taking big fistfuls of napkins. Wrapping yourself in the mantle of Saving The World when you're trying to save a few bucks verges on dishonesty, and I hate that.
Back to whatever you were doing.
