PAPER HERE TO STAY SO LET'S MAKE IT WITH HEMP

The Forest Can't Withstand Our Assault

Paper will always be with us. Electronic media will enhance and
broaden our scope for communication, but computer files, documents,
sound bytes and photo ops cannot and should not replace paper. Paper
provides the way to record thoughts and ideas that cannot be erased or
altered with a few keystrokes. Books and newspapers give you something
to hold and touch and feel. Reading a newspaper with the morning cuppa
is part of the fabric of the day. It is a basic right of life in a
civilized society.

Paper lasts longer than electronic bytes. Paper will last on shelves
for decades and always be available. However electronic material can
be lost in a nanosecond when a tree drops over a hydro line or a
hacker makes his way through to your archives.

I'll bet that anyone who holds the Bible near and dear will have it on
paper.

Electronic copies are interesting but are vacuous and nothing at all
compared with the book on the shelf.

As a position this is a new one for me. I have sat in the midst of
vast and empty areas of clear-cut forest, complete devastation
stretching from horizon to horizon, and I have been clear in my mind
that our insatiable appetite for paper is the cause and that paper has
to disappear. There was a time when foresters looked at the forest
with a view to cutting timber to build houses, boats and furniture.
With that attitude there was a strong motivation to be selective in
cutting practices. Take the larger trees that are suitable and leave
the younger ones to mature.

However, with the forest being our prime source of paper, the planners
view the trees not as timber but as pulp. Pffft to selective logging.
Mow it down and chip it. Send the experienced foresters home and bring
in the feller-bunchers, massive Dr. Zeuss machines that wade into the
forest like a lawn mower and take it all. Take what timber you want
and chip the rest and pack it off to the pulp mill.

A corporate planner sitting before his computer in a glass tower in
California will only see the forest as dollar signs. He will order the
clearing and the pulping of a forest and then he will order it to be
replanted so that more trees can grow and they can do it again. This
is what passes for sustainable forestry. Never mind that as the
machines denude the land, they wipe away a whole ecosystem, a highly
intricate matrix of life, all of it being critical to keeping the
wholeness of our planet healthy and well.

I once heard the publisher of a medium-sized Canadian environmental
magazine proudly tell me that every issue of his publication consumed
a truckload of wood chips. That was bitter irony in the extreme. And
here I am communicating with you through the very medium that I say is
at the core of the problem and asserting into the bargain that paper
will not and should not go away.

There is a dilemma here.

We need to make paper out of something else.

Hemp is the obvious choice. Hemp makes fine paper and the farming and
secondary industry would be a wonderful boon to local economies
everywhere. Farmers can grow it as a cash crop in just about any
environment where things grow. If the social sting were taken out of
the equation and local farmers could freely grow a cash crop with a
whole panoply of possible end products, do you not think they would?
Of course they would and the economic benefits would show up in town
quickly I am sure.

But the miracle product, hemp, is beset with a huge pulp, paper and
forest industry organized to work with wood and loath to change. This
is a great sprawling empire including international corporations
spanning the world in their influence, while down at ground level
whole communities and large regions of the country are organized down
to their grassroots to think wood pulp. These folks are not too keen
to think change. Who pays the piper calls the tune and that tune is
certainly not singing the praises of hemp.

Then there is that companion industry, buttressing the larger economic
war against hemp, the war against marijuana.

For the record, the marijuana plants that people get high from are not
the same breed as hemp plants grown for paper, building products,
clothing, fuel oil, whatever. You could smoke the latter 'til the cows
come home and only get a headache for your efforts. However, they look
alike and there are fears that the "evil" variety could be grown
between the rows and thus disguised.

Everything then gets lumped together and the whole lot made
politically and socially unacceptable. Hopefully someday we will get
to laugh about it, but for now we are stuck.

Large industries with their supporting social systems seem to be bound
to the laws of inertia and once headed off in a direction cannot alter
course. So it would seem.

But alter course we must. The forest simply cannot withstand this
gross assault against the ecosystem and our economies are withering
for lack of something to do that will produce real money. Hemp
production is an obvious move to make.

We need to retool for a different kind of world - and I would like to
read my morning newspaper with a clear conscience please.