Spare that tree: the arithmetic of supply and demand

Many folk are thrilled that political attempts are apparently succeeding to stop forests being cut down.  Internationally there is forbidding of the deforestation of tropical forests, and in Australia we have successes in stopping clearfell logging in Tasmania and isolated places on the mainland.

But there are laws of supply and demand.  Where there is demand, then supply is encouraged.  This seems completely forgotten by those who demand.

Someone is using the palm-oil of the new plantations where tropical jungles have been burned.

Someone is using the saw-logs to build houses. 

Someone is using paper for junk-mail, newspaper supplements, charity appeals, drafts of novels, kitchen paper, flyers for events, and disposable eatware, in a way that far outstrips the use of paper even twenty years ago.  Great rolls of newsprint rumble through our city streets like tumbrels.

Someone is using disposable nappies that were unknown to their mothers, but now soiled nappies appear in beauty spots all over the world.

All these things are used in greater quantities because there are more people to do it, because there is a rising standard of living, and because there are rising standards of conspicuous consumption.

Who would re-use an envelope?  Who would use rags for dusters and kitchen clean-ups?  Who uses the backs of typed paper?  Who checks whether their toilet paper is made with recyled paper - or without cyanide bleaching, come to that.

Worse, who would pull down a perfectly good house in order to build a McMansion, and make a million dollars for the price of a million cubic feet of timber?  A million cubic feet of rubbish carted away, both of the demolition and the new construction.  Hundreds of feet of timber from the old house  is not used again. Scores of forest trees stand as a frame to the McMansion, which has a life of fifty years at the most.  They look like a forest indeed, until the covering of the walls hides them.

The greater scandal of modern Christmas is not so much the materialism, but the waste.

Who keeps Christmas decorations till the next year? What happens to the Christmas tree?  Who keeps the best of the Christmas cards for a National Gallery to decorate their home in the future - and the best of the cards are fit for a National Gallery. Why can’t we send recyclable cards that others can pass on to others?  Why cant we wrap presents in scarves or useful boxes or at least re-used gift-wrap?  (For presents get half their glamour for being wrapped, I grant you that).

Why are so many presents not what the recipient wanted?  What happens to them then?

Why do retailers have to depend upon reckless spending at Chrismas to save them?  What of all the makers of the goods?  Surely they must be considered - well, yes, think of all the jobs that we need in our society, and then of the people doing jobs that are not needed.

When someone dies, there was a custom in some countries' in olden days that a pyre would be made on which the most precious worldly goods of the deceased would be piled with him, and all went up in flames.  Today not only do we have the most precious timbers of the world cremated with the loved one in his coffin, but likely as not, a skip outside the former home will be piled high to take the rest of his belongings as rubbish.  A few heirlooms might be saved.  But meanwhile even in the same suburb there would be people who would value the old furnitture and chattels. But we have not the mechanism to make a transfer easy, or easy enough for our hurried ways.

A rethink of where our society is going would help save the forests far away that we are so intent on saving.

At present, the fashion is for keeping the home looking clean and empty as a real-estate advertisement.  Hoarding is unfashionable; to keep something "‘seven years and you’ll find a use for it" has gone out of the vocabulary of proverbs. 

Partly this is an extension of the development of electronic communications, where we find that we must throw out yesterday's gear because today’s supersedes it.  But we extend this waste far too much.

The time is coming when the word CONSUMER will be a bad word, meaning to consume something all up, which is what it meant in the beginning. RECYCLER is a bit better, but  we will be glad to use the word USER, which implies stewardship, and others able to use something after us, without reworking it.

Tomorrow will still have gardens, we hope, to give air to breathe in the cities - but how about in those gardens we grow our own local timber?  This is a way of thinking that can extend over everything we do.

We think about the environment in terms of supply, and legislate to reduce the supply - but the supply will be extorted from the environment as long as our demands cause it to be extracted.