L.A. Liberty

“There oughta be a law!”

My new number 1 goal in life is to make excessive paper use as illegal as possible. It’s time we properly embrace technology already. This is beyond ridiculous. No one should need a warehouse just for half of their files.

I’m printing this out and sharing it with all my friends and colleagues*. It’s important for them to know that your priorities trump ours.

After all, the resource you feel we are “wasting” - trees, in the form of paper - is actually something we have literally valued more than you. How? Well, we paid for this paper in our possession. We pay for the storage of this paper, the folders, binders, filing cabinets, and warehouses. We pay - through a private firm, but also through our taxes - for that paper to be recycled; a process that produces a resource (pulp) that is then purchased from the recycling center by some other paper company in order to turn a profit.

So instead of - by “mak[ing] excessive paper use as illegal as possible” - threatening to steal our money (fined) or to have us kidnapped and likely battered (arrested) and thrown into rape boxes (prison), why not - from the rightfully-acquired funds of individuals who share your views - pay the paper companies for their trees and their factories and put them out of their earth-destroying business? Of course, you’ll have to offer enough above their current profit margin to make it worth their while. And you may have to ignore all the people you’d be putting out of work (you’d be putting most of them out of work anyway using your preferred method of legislation, so don’t sweat it). But by employing this method, your desires for preservation will peacefully, by exercising your demand for an end to paper waste and thus curbing the market’s supply of paper, lead paper-abusers such as myself to channel our resources more efficiently.

No threat of violence required!

*The people in my business - the motion picture industry - agree with your noble earth-saving impulses implicitly. Ironically, they also print out thousands upon thousands of pages of script changes daily. But they drive Priuses to work, so I guess it all balances out…

Posted January 24, 2011 at 1:02pm in ∆ Environment mohandasgandhi riposte | comments || home