Paper Recycling
I found this article in the Sacramento Bee about the "problems" with paper recycling rather infuriating. No, not because the trees we use here come from out of state and are supposedly harvested under less than green conditions. It's because nowhere in the article is there a suggestion- or even a hint of one- that we replace the imported logs with ones grown and harvested in California.
This is typical California, and you wonder why we've gotten into the economic mess we're in. Rather than use our own logs, albeit under rather strict government regulation, we're told we should cut down on the use of paper or stop using paper altogether. This attitude seems to prevail in this state and is getting worse. We are doomed.
I like what this lady wrote in the Times- Standard the other day about using paper.
posted by Fred Mangels @ 7:26 AM
13 comments
13 Comments:
Sorry Fred, ya lost me on this one. By her/your reasoning, we should commit crimes to make more law enforcement jobs and start more fires to keep more firefighters employed and.....oh geez. It's a ridiculous line of reasoning.
No it isn't. People use paper and need paper. If some are so upset that harvesting methods of the trees we buy outside the state aren't "green" enough, then why not get our trees from within the state where logging is so heavily regulated it's been almost shut down?
Everything I keep hearing from the enviros seems to have no concern for jobs- never mind the hypocrisy behind so many green efforts. Don't like the way paper is being recycled? Stop using paper. Don't like plastic shopping bags? Ban them and to hell with the people that make them.
Oh, I've heard some cities down south are talking about getting rid of paper shopping bags now. Not green enough.
We can't drill for oil here, or do anything else that allows people to work. That is the predominant green/ leftie/ democrat mentality that's running this state now, and it's sickening. To make things worse, Obama seems to be using California as a model for how he wants the rest of the nation to look like. The future does not look good.
I never recycle newspapers or paper products. I let these carbon storage units go back into the ground in landfills so that new carbon-sequestering can continue on in young forest trees taking more carbon out of the atmosphere.
You want to help save the planet from global warming you ignore enviros and use more paper, use more wood products and grow more trees. You don't stop the tree growing process like enviros want to do because for political reasons they don't want to understand the basic photosynthesis process when it is done through commercial tree farming. Why? Because it makes their call for reestablishing old growth forests in place of younger commercial forests look anti-science and silly as well as counterproductive in using commercial and state-owned forests to remove carbon from the atmosphere.
Use more wood and grow more trees wherever they are naturally part of the environment. When my first wife and I lived up a canyon in the lower Hollywood Hills only about five blocks from the Hollywood Freeway we who lived that in that canyon all noticed that the air there was far less smoggy in our canyon because of so many trees growing there. Grow more trees..
Grow more trees...
Exactly! One of America's renewable resources.
Its frustrating to not have the support of the local environmental community when it comes to forest management. Many non-industrial THPs and NTMPs are actually mini-restoration plans due to the requirements to upgrade roads and stream crossings. The best management practices employed in Ca, particularily in coho watersheds, often result in a "net sediment savings" for some projects. In fact, the THP/NTMP process is the primary mechanism for the implementation of the Clean Water Act on timberlands (besides using tax payer's money for grant restoration). If you are not harvesting timber commercially via a permitted project, nobody is requiring you to restore the impacts of the past.
Its the act of doing nothing in many instances that causes these chronic sources of erosion to persist. Disingenuine.
What the environazis don't want you to know is that almost no paper is manufactured from so called "old growth" trees. Virtually all paper products are manufactured from sustainable tree farms in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina.
In the progressive's model society of Cuba there will be no toilet paper supplies for ordinary Cubans until after January 2010. All current supplies are reserved for Communist party apparatchiks and the tourist industry to clean their red asses.
My only problem with tree farms are the replacement of old growth with tree farms. This is short-sighted.
Tree farms themselves certainly sequester carbon. In areas where rain and nitrogen are plentiful, carbon dioxide is the factor which most influences tree growth rate.
This report about an experiment with free-air CO2 enrichment (people call this "FACE") shows that without a doubt, tree farms are capable of sucking down much more carbon than is available in our atmosphere
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2000/08/000811062434.htm
The same goes for high-intensity grass farming, especially species like elephant grass. Hemp is another bigtime carbon sucker if this were to be pursued someday.
The problem is we need to do all this recycling and regulating because modern American agriculture was regulated with stupid ideas that ignored basic scientific principles that we are (or should be) acutely aware of today. People who claim to know all about why forests should be protected for atmospheric reasons are usually ignorant of the specific chemical and biological processes that go along with this, particularly photosynthesis and decomposition in different microclimates.
Sewage has come to light as a goldmine for nitrogen to keep tree farms going strong. Some people are very against the use of "sludge" for the possibility of some low-level contamination. Again, do these folks understand that when you enrich soil to a certain point, microorganisms will house more rapidly than if it had just dumped on bare land?
I dunno, sometimes I think it is hopeless. Our society uses strict regulations and subsidies to undo the damage done by other strict regulations and subsidies. It's just stupid.
The tree farms in the southeastern states occupy land that previously supported what we westerners would call scrub forests. The trees in the original forests seldom reached the proportions found in the western states. Parasites generally killed them off early. A 50 year old oak, hickory or maple is very unusual and sycamore trees have become nearly extinct by a natural blight and the gypsy moth.
The major specie on tree farms is the loblolly pine which is fast growing and harvested in the 15th to 18th year. It is an excellent sequesterer of CO2 and should therefore be designated as the official tree of the warmista religion. Now if only the warmistas can find a human activity to regulate that produces the Major "greenhouse" gas (H2O) we will have achieved nirvana i.e. pre industrial squalor.
"warmistas' and "environazis."
ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ must be Greek for Rush Limbaugh fan.
I see. So the answer here is to 'blame the other party', as usual, and say its all their fault.
meanwhile, do nothing to HELP a hurting environment, OR do anything to create jobs?
Just hurl names like environazis?
Lots of things you can actually DO, but I guess its easier to sound like Glenn Beck, eh?
You know for many years I took flak from enviros whenever I told them that young forests take more CO2 from the atmosphere than old growth forests. Their enviro leadership conveniently left out this troublesome fact because they didn't want their grunts in the trees knowing anything contradicting the enviro mantra of "don't cut anything-make all forests old growth". Couldn't have ethical confusion in the ranks for the determined political assault on Palco. Now even enviros have figured out it was ecologically dumb to call for establishing old growth forests everywhere commercial forests existed.
The power of Stephen's logic was simply too much for those evil environmentalists, and his ability to romanticize his past is awe-inspiring.
Fred,
Looks like the Chris Matthews, Kieth Olberman fans are emerging from under their rocks. Such a pity they are so few. There must be a thril running up their legs.
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