PROTECTING OUR VIRGIN FORESTS

Reading the headlines to this article: America's Love Affair with Really Soft Toilet Paper Is Causing an Environmental Catastrophe
By Tara Lohan, AlterNet. Posted February 27, 2009, really puzzled me. It seems that America is the leading cause of the demand for virgin tree forests being cut down, thus spiraling us as leaders on man-made causes to promoting Global Warming. This came somewhat as a surprise as I have been promising myself that the next time I buy a case of toilet paper it will not be the 1 ply, thousand sheet kind, that is like using waxed tissue paper, often without even the wax. I came to this conclusion after realizing that you have to use twice as much 1-ply, and and more squares because it falls apart on contact with any liquid.

Now I am conflicted. Will my use of 2-ply, softer toilet paper made the Arctic melt faster, thus coming down to shove the Gulf Stream further South, thus turning the UK and Europe back into an Ice Age. I who never feel guilt over anything began to perspire at the very thought that all that rain in Britain may be turned to snow just so that my rear will have a kinder and gentler wipe.

However, that paled next to the Greemnpeace Guide which suggests recycling tissue. Not seeing the meat that gets ground up into sausages assaults my imagination quite enough; recycling toilet paper??? Reading on in the Guide, it suggests: Reusable Cloth Products
"Greenpeace also recommends using reusable cloth hankies instead of facial tissues as using handkerchiefs further reduces our impact on ancient forests." No they can't be suggesting that we all go back to wearing diapers, can they? Oddly, nowhere did I find any instructions as to just what we should be recycling that makes TP. I assumed that if we are crass enough to waste virgin trees for soft TP, we are also wasting water flushing it down. On no! They can't mean we are to recycle the paper before we waste water flushing it away! I was once told a way to conserve TP is to use both sides and felt wasteful when I did not follow that suggestion.

Reading on, I began to feel a bit more comfortable because they use bleach, and we all know bleach will kill most anything and make it white again. I read: "Greenpeace used product labeling and direct verification of claims by the companies included in our Guide. In the few cases where companies did not respond to our request for verification of recycled content percentages and whitening processes used, we assumed 0% overall recycled, 0% post-consumer recycled and ECF bleaching." So now I know what they SHOULD be doing though, as I read it, not all people follow the rules.

Nearing total distress now, I study other options. They no longer make Sears and Roebuck catalogs, that was my first hope. Here in the snowy Northeast, there is not enough green leaved stuff out there long enough to make it a practical alternative. I remember what TP was like before someone DID invent some soft stuff...in fact it was such a joy to one man on TV he could not stop squeezing it. That was quite touching though I was never brought to that degree of fond expression, personally.

Alas, I have concluded since our town's recycling is but once a week, I will limit myself to recycling bottles, plastic, and cans. Since I get no newspapers I am limited to recycling shopping catalogs (which I really think cost more trees than TP but I can't check on that other than to say the volume of shopping catalogs and free coupons in my household, in a week, far exceeds the volume of TP used in all three bathrooms.

I'm left with an insurmountable puzzle. While I wish to keep our planet green, I still don't know what to recycle. It is a dilemma with which I will have to continue to struggle until an acceptable solution comes to me.

TO WHOM ARE WE LISTENING ABOUT OUR WORLD?

It seems that McCain has been so busy campaigning and listening to his own line that he is fantasying something non-existent. He seems not to be hearing that the Iraqis are chewing us up and spitting us out as we did to them for the last 5 years. Listen up: They want us out of there!!!!
Al Qaeda and the Taliban are in Pakistan where we are now funding them, albeit indirectly.

"The superstitious Right fights global warming." Not since Keith Olbermann issued a series of open letters to Bush have I heard a case presented as coherently and honestly as David Michael Green, writing for Environment. It is well worth your reading of it.

WHEN I WANT TO UNDERSTAND

Sometimes I get silly and want to understand what is going on in the world. At times like this, I turn to the Internet and read sources that claim to be enlightening. An article on the Financial Meltdown looked promising. It was. It is not only informative, more importantly it is seriously depressing!

Next I caught an article that states: Pro-environment Evangelical Seminary Student Jonathan Merrit is rebuked by Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, who says the Green movement promotes abortion and homosexuality. Jonathan Merrit writes lots of words but, essentially, says nothing. Perkins also unwittingly acknowledges that global warming is REAL but they (the religious right) don't want to stop it because it only delays "the Second Coming". Perkins says you should prepare to be Raptured, not "throw away the keys to your SUV and jump on the Al Gore bandwagon." That requires more blind faith which is about all religious people ask today. 'Follow the leader', 'have faith', 'don't question those who know more than you'; seems advice liberally thrown around but takes us in no forward direction. We all regress to childhood with that.

Shumer says that Bush is Herbert Hoover.

The unfortunate similarities in the statements and attitudes led Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to offer this observation on Fox News this morning:

The President is indeed behaving like Herbert Hoover. We’re in the most serious economic problem we’ve been in in a very long time — much worse than 2001. The President’s hands-off attitude is reminiscent of Herbert Hoover in 1929 and 1930.

Schumer added that "this has become “the Bush recession,” while Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) noted that "this will be the second recession in this administration".

In an editorial this morning, the New York Times fact-checks Bush’s economic speech:

Mr. Bush boasted about 52 consecutive months of job growth during his presidency. What matters is the magnitude of growth, not ticks on a calendar. The economic expansion under Mr. Bush -- which it is safe to assume is now over -- produced job growth of 4.2 percent. That is the worst performance over a business cycle since the government started keeping track in 1945. […]

Mr. Bush was wrong to say wages are rising. On Friday morning, the day he spoke, the government reported that wages failed to outpace inflation in February, for the fifth straight month. Productivity growth has also weakened markedly in the past two years, a harbinger of a lower overall standard of living for Americans.

Bush’s denial of economic truth means that “Americans are ill-prepared for hard times” ahead.

So what about us, 'the simple folk'? I for one want to pull out everything that points to the old signs that said, "It's the economy, stupid" When I hear people say, "There is so little time left for Bush, how much damage can he do?" I shudder and know that the answer is "Too much!" Should I help pull their heads out of the sand or place mine there with them? It seems that the choices are too few.

LOCAL SIGNS OF GLOBAL WARMING

Regardless of whether global warming is a natural cycle or not, there is every indication that humanity is hastening it by its bad habits on the environment. One of my favorite cartoons is of a father and son walking in the snow. The boy is as tall as his father's waist and the snow is just under his nose. The father is saying, "It doesn't snow like it used to when I was a boy." He makes a gesture passing his hand under his nose and states, "When I was a boy it snowed up to here."

When I was a child, snow started in the fall, early, and was high enough that we could make tunnels in it. In the past 50 years I have seen it deep enough to tunnel in only twice and that was almost 30 years ago in the blizzard of '78. Labor day was the day we put summer clothes away because we knew it would soon frost and all annual vegetation would be dead one morning soon. Our first freezing frost in now coming in November. As of today, the maple trees in my back yard have green leaves on one variety and yellow leaves on another, still on the branches. This did not happen before in my recall. My Impatiens finally went to its parallel universe and the blooms left my garden just a week or more ago. While it is lovely to be warmer and wear lighter clothing, and I love not having the freezing winters with which I grew up. There is a reason for it that many politicians seem not to want to hear.

In freezing temperatures, my Great Laurel closes its leaves up so that it looks like each whorl is hugging itself to keep warm. I was surprised last winter to see how seldom that happened. Even the burning bush (usually ablaze by this time of year) has not yet turned red all over. If these signs are in my limited cosmos, what about the pictures of glaciers I flew over in 1989 that are totally gone near Juneau? Today it is quite a different sight. The frozen past is almost gone.

Meanwhile, the short-sighted think it is a blessing with heating prices so high. 200 billion catalogs are mailed in the US each year. Environmentally that is like adding another 200 million cars on the road. I should think that companies could save a lot of money if catalogs were mostly online, or requested, since only about 1 1/2 % (if they are lucky) draw sales. We, the buyers, pay for all these catalogs, many of which land in the trash without even being opened. Think of the trees that would be saved, the more oxygen returned to the atmosphere and the more carbon dioxide being sucked up.

Oh well, as long as there are easily duped people in our world, things will go on as they have been for the past few years, downhill fast!