Sustainability Begins with Realities
It is human nature to take a narrow view of one’s needs and wishes. Individuals concern themselves with the present and immediate future, personal comfort, family members, budget; but this narrow focus obscures realities that have an immense cumulative effect.
Reality: We’re all in this together, and individual choices matter.
On budget?
At a Green Paper Seminar recently, our Creative Director spoke with an educational catalog salesperson. She said she was happy to have a better understanding of the problems that come from buying paper from illegally logged trees; but for now, she had to stick with her budget.
Reality: A low upfront price almost always means high environmental costs. It may be cheaper in the short run to buy illegally logged paper, but the follow-on cost to everyone will be incalculable.
"Those" people?
A kind-hearted fellow in Virginia made an interesting comment to our Creative Director. He said: "it’s a shame how those people down there are "just developing everything." Meanwhile, his work as a contractor had become quite cushy with his parent’s mountaintop purchase of over 130 acres and selling off tracts for him to build houses on. He was finishing up a log cabin that he referred to as someone’s "pout house", a three-story cabin on a cleared mountaintop, where the owner had put in a $30,000 driveway and a $5,000 well just to have a place to occasionally get away to. How much forest can we afford to lose for this sort of "pouting"?
Reality: Every time a house is built in the forest, it creates a large negative impact on every aspect of the ecosystem, in addition to the loss from access roads. The more people get "close to nature" by building vacation homes in it, the more nature they destroy.