On 2004-10-02 11:47:32 -0700, (JimL) said:

never understood this concept of "saving trees." Like any farm
crop, harvest them, plant more. If they weren't harvested, if there
wasn't a market, they wouldn't be planted.

The problem is, in one sense anyway, simple - trees grow much too
slowly to be compared to a farm crop.

Farm crops are grown on a circumscribed piece of land, and the farmer
plants the crop, waits until it matures, harvests it, and starts over.
If trees were farmed this way (small plots of dedicated land, planting
your own trees, waiting till the crop is mature, cutting it all down,
and starting again on the same small piece of land) then your argument
would make more sense to me. Farmers don't cut things they didn't plant
themselves.

That doesn't mean I'm exactly in favour of saving trees - but I am in
favour of very careful use of the land they're standing on, and in
favour therefore of not cutting more old trees (due to the concomitant
damage to everything else), but waiting to cut the ones that have been
planted instead.

I'm not sure how my attitude relates to the paper situation.

David