Earth Day Whining Extravaganza

A recent article posted on the National Geographic Online suggests that every single day the world-wide use of toilet paper consumes the equivalent of 27,000 trees. They don’t say what kind of tree, but it is presumably not the Sawtooth Oak. The news could be worse; if my teenage sons ever start using toilet paper, the destruction could be phenomenal. My reading of the article indicates that the total world toilet paper use is even greater than its equivalent quantity of trees since much toilet paper is made from recycled paper products, presumably not recycled toilet paper.

An Evergreen State College student (no joke) in Olympia, Washington, using NASA satellite data, has estimated that there are currently approximately 61 trees per person on Planet Earth. So, if we are losing 27,000 trees a day to the commode, we would need to reduce the world population by 442 persons per day to keep the ratio constant. Unfortunately, we are increasing the world population by something approaching 200,000 persons per day. This is like dropping 1.3 times the population of Bibb County, Georgia onto the Earth’s surface every single day. If you have ever been to Bibb County, Georgia, you will know that this is not a good thing.

The total current tree harvest is estimated at 270,000 per day world-wide (notice, toilet paper accounts for a full 10 percent of this total). This works out to around 100 million trees a year. UN statistics indicate that around one billion trees are planted each year, so we’re doing great, right? Well, the problem is that trees take a long time to grow and 10 little tiny seedlings can’t replace a mature tree in the ecosystem; we are, therefore, losing habitat at a massive rate and, of course, all those little trees don’t survive to maturity. The trees planted are not necessarily the same types as the ones harvested, so we are radically altering the environment, with unpredictable consequences.

This whole deal with the trees is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Mankind’s impact on the world ecosystem. As population grows, which it inexorably does, the demand for all these resources increases, cities grow, forests disappear, garbage dumps proliferate and the margin of error for human civilization decreases. Unfortunately, at least in America, discussion of environmental issues is lost in the reflexively bipolar political theater known as representative democracy. Because the Liberals support abortion rights, gay rights and public funding of the arts, the Conservatives feel they must oppose everything else the Liberals promote, because that’s how they roll. What everyone involved in this process seems to forget is that political power on a dead world is of limited value.

I was born and raised in Macon, Georgia (in Bibb County!), not Boston, and I never went to an Ivy League school, but I am not above a little East Coast intellectual elitism when it comes to saving the planet. While many issues in life are subjective, the dependence of human life on the world’s ecosystem is not. Everything we eat is some former living something, unless we are a toddler, in which case dirt, paste and crayons are fair game, but even these things are partially organic. The air we breathe and the water we drink is kept within acceptable limits by natural processes which we are busy altering. The children of all those rednecks in Texas voting for that handsome demagogue Rick Perry will be just as screwed as mine when the world can no longer sustain this massively wasteful and quarrelsome human infestation. You don’t have to believe in global warming to know that without fish there is no McDonald’s Fish Fillet (2 for $4.00, for a limited time only).

It is difficult to speculate at what point we will be confronted with the real consequences of our irresponsible environmental policies and unsustainable lifestyles; we can probably rock along for several more decades without too much trauma while the fundamentals continue to deteriorate and the political anti-environmentalists continue to point to the lack of catastrophic collapse as evidence that the Liberals are just hysterical socialists who hate free enterprise. At some point, however, very bad things will start to happen and the human suffering will be wide-spread and immense, and all our stealth bombers, SUV’s and sacred principles will not put Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

America has tremendous influence in the world as a consequence of our economic and military power, and as a result of our open society and generally humane principles. We also have tremendous impact on the world as a consequence of our enourmous resource consumption and cultural leadership. We really do have the power to save the world, but it will likely not be through purging the greed, ignorance, indifference, selfishness and inhumanity from foreign lands, but by purging those same qualities from ourselves. It is not too late to stop wiping our ass with the world’s future and make peace with Mother Nature. I just hope the Republicans love their children too.