Recently I and, I gather, all other members of the Holy Cross community received the first of what promise to be an endless series of personalized monthly “paper usage reports.” The report compares my paper usage with that of my departmental colleagues; my department’s usage with that of other departments; and the College’s overall use compared to what it was a month previously. I might take pride in the fact that I used 92.04% less paper in March than my political science colleagues, and 72.89% less than the average Holy Cross employee – were it not for the fact that I am on sabbatical during the current academic year, am thus on campus only occasionally, and have no need to print out materials such as my lecture notes since I’m not currently teaching. On the other hand, while my department printed 13.75% fewer pages in March than in February, we might still be liable to blame for using 79% more paper than the average department did. (Of course the reduction from February to March might have something to do with the near-absence of faculty on campus during the March break.) Most alarmingly, it was reported that so far this year alone, my department’s paper usage is responsible for the “deforestation” of 4.99 trees.
These statistics – compiled, I have learned, by a private monitoring service that the College employs – are based largely on meaningless comparisons, for such reasons as those I have offered. (Additionally, it is quite likely, I would surmise, that heavily “verbal” disciplines like political science, history, philosophy, and English would tend to engender more paper use in the normal course of work than such fields as the natural sciences, mathematics, and perhaps foreign languages.) They have the same irrelevance as the statistics that the company that supplies my family’s electricity is legally obliged to provide on how our usage compares with those of other similarly sized houses in the neighborhood: of necessity, the statistics cannot take account of varying family sizes, whether anyone is home during the daytime on weekdays, or the presence or absence of central air conditioning.
What is most ridiculous about the paper usage report, however, is the charge that all such usage is responsible for “deforestation.” This is an utter misuse of the term. Deforestation, properly speaking, refers to the more or less permanent elimination of large forests in areas like the Amazon basin (where settlers keep clearing land in order to settle and farm – just as Americans did from the time colonization began until the settling of the West was completed.) (In the American case, however, with the decline of small-scale farming in the Northeast, much of the cleared land was subsequently re-forested.). It is particularly a problem in the Amazon because of the possibly major role that the enormous rainforest plays in the global ecosystem. It has led to a major, permanent environmental disaster in Haiti, where the thoughtless removal of most of the country’s forest some time ago led to heightened vulnerability to flooding and the loss of essential topsoil, thus impoverishing the nation. And recently, it is reported, Russian forests are being cut down by Chinese lumber companies on a large scale, without any effort at replacing them. (The Chinese are able to buy the timber cheaply, and don’t particularly care about the long-term future of Siberian forest land. It’s not their country.)
None of these dangers has any application to American paper usage. Our paper doesn’t come from the Amazon or Siberia. Leaving aside a relatively small quantity of “high-end” paper derived from rags, it comes from forests – largely in the U.S. and Canada – that are either owned or (in the case of American national forests) managed by private companies, whose practice is to replace the trees they harvest with new seedlings, and to do so on a schedule that guarantees that the overall size of the managed forest will not shrink. The lumber companies engage in this process essentially because it is in their long-term interest to do so: the trees are their “capital,” and destroying their capital would ultimately put them out of business. So they are not guilty of deforestation at all.
When I made this point to the highly qualified person in the IT department who is responsible for transmitting (not writing) the paper usage reports, she acknowledged that the “deforestation” claim was misleading, but justified it on the ground that it was a useful means of motivating faculty, staff, and students to avoid wasting paper – thus reducing the net cost to the College. In other words, the claim is something like the “noble lie” of which Socrates famously speaks in Plato’s Republic.
Speaking for myself, I believe that wasting useful resources of any kind (to say nothing of raising tuition costs as a consequence) is something to be avoided. As a child I was taught by my parents (like many other kids of the postwar era) not to leave food over on my plate, because (at the time) people were “starving in Europe.” (Unfortunately, for a while this may have led me to an undesirable weight gain, as it left me with the semiconscious impression that the more I ate, the less others would starve.) To this day, when I see a light left on in an unused room at the College (or at home), I reach in to turn it off. (My wife is sometimes irked by this practice, as when I shut off the TV when she leaves the family room for a limited time.)
I do not believe, however, that a publicly desirable goal justifies misleading the public, as the College’s paper-monitoring service is doing with its misuse of the term “deforestation” – least of all at an institution devoted to the pursuit of truth. Nor, in fact, do I see much merit in issuing individualized monthly paper reports to faculty who, I think it can safely be assumed, do not go out of their way to waste paper. And if some students are engaged in egregious, unjustified overuse of paper, why not simply charge them a modest sum for exceeding their monthly quota? (The net savings to the College might – who knows? – result in a slightly smaller tuition increase for the following year, unless it is swallowed up by the appointment of yet another associate dean for some politically correct cause.)
We are bombarded regularly, on campus and off, with an endless stream of often fact-free political propagandizing, regarding issues of race, gender, or even (per AOC) the destruction of the Earth within a dozen years owing to the supposed dangers of climate change. Please, let’s not add to it. Whether it’s printed on paper or not, such propagandizing causes infinitely more harm than wasting paper does.