Spare that tree: the arithmetic of supply and demand

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.