Please Consider… in which a reasoned article decays into a rant.

Blind acceptance of truth destroys industries and lives.  The myth that not printing an email is somehow “saving trees” is annoying to me.  Primarily because I happen to know that you’re not saving anything by avoiding the printer but more importantly because I know that you’re destroying an industry that supports a group of people that are dear to me.

You see, where I grew up Boise Cascade was a timber company. They owned land, they harvested trees, they are the primary industry in the area.    The city flag of Leesville, La has a pine tree at its center.  The Vernon Parish (that’s a Louisiana name for county, we’re not all Catholic) fair is called the “West Louisiana Forestry Festival”.

Many years later I was surprised to find that my co-workers only knew them as an office supply company.  I never connected the fact that they grew and cut timber with the fact that they made printer paper.  I knew, of course, that they made paper with the trees that they cut but always assumed that they produced it in industrial quantities and sold it to distributors.  Turns out, they do it themselves.   But no matter.

I knew the words Sustainable Forestry before most tree hugging hate group idolaters were even born. Everyone from that area did.  It was a way of life.  Central Louisiana is covered with two things.  Tree Farms and Kisatchie National Forest.  Kisatchie is one of the largest national forests in the world.  Boise is a huge force in management of both of those.

In a CenLa tree farm, trees are planted in rows about 50 feet apart.  It’s a common sight when traveling through the area with the lanes between the trees flashing buy in the same way that rows of corn appear in Ohio.  Every 10 years or so the farms are “thinned” with some of the trees being removed.  At about 25 or 30 years the area is harvested, replanted and the cycle continues.  It’s a farm.  The idea that you are somehow saving old growth hardwoods or a majestic old magnolia by not printing your school report is, hooey.  Hundreds of thousands of acres.  Tens of thousands of jobs.  All depend on actively managed tree farming.   People from the area know others who have suffered greatly from the environmental nightmare created by the “save a tree” foundation.

You smirk at us as you destroy our industry.  You call us rubes and rednecks because we have high school educations and you went to an ivy league college. You publish pictures of Redwoods and cry for us to save paper and we look at you like you really are the moron that you pretend to be.  We can publish unrelated but very moving images too.  Watch this.

Paper or plastic?  Seriously?  A paper grocery bag will rot to nothing in about a month. You can recycle or even compost it for growing your veggies.   A plastic bag takes a couple of years to decay and leaves behind it’s source chemicals… that’s even the “biodegradable” ones  that you hawk as “environmentally friendly”.

They’re not.  For years we were supposed to skip paper, save a tree and go for plastic.  Now, after years of killing wildlife and destroying lives you’ve changed our mantra to something new.

In short green boy, you have a credibility problem.  Paper or Plastic?  Ask the cute turtle.

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