COLUMN: Recycled paper use helps stop Earth’s biological meltdown
From the moment of our birth, each of us has been systematically trained to maximize our consumption of material things while, paradoxically, minimizing our cash outflow.
Logos, advertisements and a brand-centered sense of identity and self-worth are part of the corporate parenthood by proxy whose design and goals, discussed behind closed doors, will send chills down your spine and Orwellian imagery into your dreams. The pursuit of the cheapest and most convenient has been so consistently drilled into our brains that asking the simple question of where a product came from and upon whose back its profit was made seems novel.
Even for professors and college administrators whom we would expect to know better, the rules of the bottom line and the lowest common denominator hold true. This is particularly true in our paper purchasing habits, where Weyerhaeuser products, among others, flood our campus.
Utah State University is patronizing a company that, while studiously cultivating its image as a responsible land steward, has sold off thousands of acres for development (much of its land was acquired through government giveaways), and cultivates incestuous political power through hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, a revolving door with government that allows a Reagan-era EPA administrator to sit on its Board of Directors and a first-name relationship with George the Elder. (The latter has much to do with the illegal liquidation of forests in the Pacific Northwest that has been enshrined in a political “compromise” that governs those forests to this day.)
Weyerhaeuser also has perfected the manipulation of timber workers, laying off 8,000 between 1995 and 1999 in a “restructuring,” and is infamous for exporting raw logs to the Far East and elsewhere (raw log export produces the fewest jobs per unit timber), while demonizing environmentalists for trying to protect the few scraps of old-growth left in the region. And I haven’t even touched Georgia-Pacific, International Paper or the other brands found here.
However, I am pleased to announce that USU’s College of Natural Resources has decided to remove itself from the chain of destruction by switching to 100 percent recycled paper. By committing itself to recycled paper, the CNR will avoid participating in the timber industry, an activity that accounts for a substantial portion of the Earth’s current biological meltdown.
The CNR has shown that principle and responsible citizenship is not merely the subject of endless platitudes and feel-good academic lectures, but something to be practiced even when the powerful tides of economic power sweep the opposite direction. The CNR joins the University of North Carolina, the University of Vermont and others in recognizing that academic diatribes about sustainability printed on paper confiscated from the home of a pine marten or Coho salmon is inconsistent and hypocritical.
Certainly, it will cost more – but this cost is more than exceeded by the tens of billions of dollars in government subsidies to virgin paper through the endless deployment of military forces in Saudi Arabia (recycled paper is far less energy-intensive), construction of 400,000 miles of roads in our National Forests (mostly for logging), public landfill disposal of 50 million tons of paper every year, public assistance to fishermen bankrupted by the destruction of Pacific salmon fisheries and other uncompensated menaces. Much credit is owed to our CNR administrators.
However, that leaves seven colleges and a network of computer labs and copy centers still complicit in the liquidation or our planet and the profiteering of an ecological criminal. I address this article to the respective administrators of those colleges and to the students who attend them – the CNR has shown ecological responsibility is both practical and necessary. The choice is yours.