As part of the ongoing green attack on our potty habits, The Guardian (UK) has this quote from Allen Hershkowitz, a “senior scientist” with the Natural Resources Defense Council:
“Future generations are going to look at the way we make toilet paper as one of the greatest excesses of our age. Making toilet paper from virgin wood is a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution… People just don’t understand that softness equals ecological destruction.”
Mr. Herschkowitz obviously has never been in a forest before. Neither has he been on a tree farm. If you want healthy forests, cut. If you cut. Why not make toilet paper? Perhaps Mr. Herschkowitz needs a night alone in a couple of woods I know of that the owner loves too much to allow any cutting. A good stormy night would be best. The odds of him coming out to blather more flatulence would truly be slim. If he did come out perhaps he would have a new incite into what truly caring for a forest means.
Trees are grown to make paper. The ignorance of this statement on toilet paper is staggering. I am tree farmer, we harvest trees and plant trees to replace those harvested.
The real problem is further upstream. We are making body waste from “virgin” food. Just quit eating; problem solved.
First they take our light bulbs, now they are trying to take our toilet paper? I thought it was ridiculous when that singer, what’s her name, said we should use one sheet each. If you only need one sheet, why wipe? Now they are saying we should go back to dry leaves and grass or what?
The green boogie-men are at it again intimating in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, and now widely reported here in the U.S., that soft-ply toilet paper (some manufactured in my birth state of Wisconsin) is evil incarnate and, “. . . a lot worse than driving Hummers in terms of global warming pollution.” The Guardian article quotes two neo-socialist organizations (Green Peace and NRDC) making the claim that our manufacturing of tp is environmentally hazardous because we are supposedly decimating what they call “virgin trees” in the process. Don’t be fooled, the argument is clearly misleading and wrong.
Toilet paper is generally made from new paper, not “virgin timber.” A combination of softwood and hardwood, such as Southern pine and Douglas fir (softwoods), combined with maple or oak (hardwoods), are used. The softer wood gives strength, while the hardwood makes a softer feeling paper. The reality is that the trees used-pines, maples and oaks-are no more “virgin” than Madonna. Moreover, the trees used generally grow very quickly and, in fact, are replanted or carefully managed.
The position of these neo-socialists is untenable and dangerous to the Wisconsin economy because if you buy into their preferred source of energy, biomass, you are then committed to NOT plant trees, but rather, on the margin, permanently cut and clear treed areas in order to plant more corn, switch grass, hemp or sugar cane – all of which are not as effective as pine forests (or forests in general) at consuming CO2 (their argument, not mine). If we use their biomass premise our “virgin trees,” managed forests, and the few remaining virgin forests, really will be at risk.
Paper companies are not the enemy, they are excellent stewards of the lands they forest; they replant and actively manage forests, and they do so by market necessity. They know very well that they need a steady supply of wood as demand for their product rises. The market for their goods, in this case toilet paper, subsumes that they reforest and manage responsibly. This means more, not less, trees, and, specifically, those tree varieties that produce the best quality toilet paper demanded by the marketplace.
The green boogie-men want to have their biomass and burn it too, but in the game of carbohydrates verses hydrocarbons they never had a real argument, and they lose this one over toilet paper too.
“Softness equals ecological destruction.” Has anyone notified Mr. Whipple?
Perhaps Mr. Herschkowitz would like to use corn cobs. They are decidedly not soft and therefore should satisfy all of his requirements for protection of the ecology.