Here is a typical scenario: You’re eating lunch on Dexter Lawn, enjoying a little Vitamin D (a by-product of our sun) and meeting your daily nutrient requirements. Munching on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you take a big bite, causing a chain reaction of bread shoving jelly into the peanut butter right on down to the last nanometer of bread – resulting in it all oozing on down to your chin. So what do you do?
Well, of course, you do what any other of the 20,000 Cal Poly students would do. You grab a paper napkin, which you probably have more than one of, wipe it off and keep on staring at the passersby. In the end, you’re just wishing your mom put a little more into those Plus Dollars so you could have gotten a nice juicy tri-tip sandwich at Campus Market instead.
If this sounds familiar, consider that 20,000 Cal Poly students using at least two napkins a day results in almost 15 million napkins a year. With a standard 5-by-5 napkin, you could make a paper trail from downtown San Luis Obispo to Denver, Colorado.
So what exactly are the implications of the 15 million napkins wasted each year? First, begin with a living organism, a tree, which is killed and harvested for the wood. Consider that one-third of U.S. timber is imported from Canada’s Boreal forests, which make up a large majority of the Earth’s old growth forests, and that the most common practice with timber harvesting is clear-cutting.
Clear-cutting is utilized because it is inexpensive, efficient and delivers high pay back rates. The practice works by taking a piece of forest, preferably old growth forests, and literally cutting every single tree down to the roots – in other words, destroying an entire section of an ecosystem, which provides a habitat to hundreds of species.
Yet while the spotted owl and other endangered species are great creatures, the even more important issue at stake is the livelihood of the human race. Tree hugging aside, clear-cutting leads to flooding, erosion, landslides, lower water quality and stream degradation. This may sound like mere environmentalism, but in fact these effects result in decreased air quality for humans, depleted fisheries, climate change and reduced natural resources. These environmental changes in turn have economic consequences; for example, depleted salmon fisheries severely affect an entire industry.
To make matters worse, many timber companies are taxpayer-subsidized. Old growth forests take up to 700 years to grow what timber companies blindly slaughter, leaving behind a degraded ecosystem with little to no chance of reproduction. In other words, taxpayers are putting a down payment on the slow demise of future generations’ resources.
What happens when all the forests are gone, when the last great oak stands? Do we blindly cut it like the Easter Islanders or should we learn from their mistake and start regenerating forests?
There are many small steps Cal Poly students can take to aid in stopping the war against our forests. Here is a simple list:
1) Stop using napkins. Grab a handkerchief. It may sound silly or gross, but one handkerchief per student will eliminate those 15 million paper napkins. Just make sure when cleaning it to throw it in with a full load of laundry.
2) Make sure to buy paper products from sustainably-harvested timber.
3) Get involved with the Kleercut campaign, which is devoted to holding unsustainable timber companies responsible for their damage and to educate on the effects of clear-cutting. Go to www.kleercut.net for more information.
4) Go out with the local Natural Resources Conservation Service or One Cool Planet and plant some trees within San Luis Obispo County.
5) Toss your paper in the blue bins, not the gray – recycle! Ten percent of recycled paper saves a million acres of forest.
So maybe this really is about tree hugging, but where would humans be without wood? ?
Jeremy Grodkiewicz is an industrial engineering senior and a member of the Empower Poly Coalition.