My family members were quite taken with the angel live oaks in Hampton Park. The way the branches spread out skimming the surface of the ground — you don’t see that in Pennsylvania. Their intrigue made me wish I knew more. Catching up on digital things today, I came across the Good Morning Lowcountry’s Big Trees post, and from my inbox, in a kind of juxtaposition, this week’s EarthTalk discusses regional logging:
…more logging is conducted in the Southeast than anywhere else in the world and Southeast pulpwood is in three quarters of all paper sold in the U.S.
What makes all the logging in the U.S. Southeast so egregious is not so much the sheer amount of wood harvested, but the destruction of biodiversity that the creation of single-species wood plantations in the region has wrought. Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the so-called New World, the Southeast played host to the highest tree species diversity on the continent. But a 2001 study by the U.S. Forest Service found that 40 percent of the region’s formerly diverse native pine forests have been turned into intensively managed single-species pulp plantations designed for maximum yield of wood pulp for making paper.
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The end product of all this activity, postage stamp-sized wood chips, often ends up exported to Japan and used to make toilet paper, says Allen Hershkovitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “Most consumers don’t even think about the fact that toilet paper comes from trees,†he adds.
Let’s end positively — EarthTalk has advocacy info for changing this.