Plush Toilet Paper Flushes Old Forests

This post now on Fox Business and Google News.
Photos and text by Sally Kneidel, PhD

Pictured above, one of dozens of logging trucks I saw in Washington State, carrying what the locals called little "pecker poles" - because the available mature trees are gone.

American's insistence on soft thick toilet paper is an unnecessary threat to the world's old-growth forests, says a report published Thursday in the Washington Post.

What exactly constitutes a luxury toilet paper and why is it so costly to the environment?

A sheet of toilet paper (made of wood fibers) can be rated on 3 aspects of softness:

• surface smoothness
• bulky feel
• "drapability" or lack of rigidity

As it turns out, very old trees have longer wood fibers which make a product higher in the 3 desirable qualities above.

Fibers from younger trees make a paper that feels somewhat rougher than the most luxurious brands like Cottonelle and Quilted Northern Ultra Plush.

But is it really that different? Not to me. My family buys either Seventh Generation toilet paper or Green Forest brand from Planet Inc., both of which are made entirely from recycled paper. I have a roll of Green Forest right here and it feels very soft to me. I can't imagine that any increase in softness would make a difference in comfort. Marcal Manufacturing, in New Jersey, makes toilet paper from recycled paper too, although I haven't seen it in stores around my town.

Pine plantations likened to a row of Walmart stores
Old-growth forests, and all native forests, are already in a world of trouble from the timber industry. International timber companies are going after every unprotected and accessible forest on the planet. In the southern United States, where I live, more than 32 million acres of mature forest have been clear-cut and replaced with sterile monoculture plantations of loblolly pine. These pine plantations (not native to the areas where they're planted) are devoid of animal life. They are managed chemically with pesticides, and competing undergrowth is generally removed, so that the insect life and spacial heterogeneity necessary to support an ecosystem are entirely missing. E.O. Wilson, a Pulitzer Prize winning Harvard ecologist, called pine plantations the ecological equivalent of a line of Walmart Stores. The U.S. Forest Service projects that by the year 2040, pine plantations will occupy 54-58 million acres of southern forests, almost a third of the south's total 200 million forested acres.

We all know what the timber industry has done to the Pacific Northwest
When I visited the Olympic peninsula of Washington State just a couple of years ago, I passed more loaded timber trucks than I did cars. A local told me that the trucks were all headed to the harbors of Seattle, where the timber will be shipped overseas.

Southeast Asia has hardly any remaining stands of old-growth forest left, which is one reason that the orangutan is seriously endangered. It has almost no remaining habitat.

In African rainforest, and in the Amazon, international timber and paper companies have created access roads into the most impenetrable forests - roads that provice access to those who would harvest the wildlife, access for settlers who will slash and burn forest trees to make cattle pastures. The roads also provide egress for previously sequestered pathogens, such as the Ebola virus and perhaps HIV.

True, toilet paper accounts for only 5% of the world's forest-products industry. Paper and cardboard packaging make up 26%, although more than half is from recycled products. Newspapers account for 3%.

Half the world uses no toilet paper
But 5% is far higher than it needs to be. In Africa, most bathrooms have no toilet paper. You might find a newspaper or a magazine you can tear lying in the outhouse....or you may find nothing. In Latin America, the toilet paper is thin yet adequate. But it must be thrown in the trash can; Latin American plumbing can't handle it. Why do Americans have to have everything deluxe? The rest of world is growing tired of our overconsumption. A growing number of Americans are getting impatient with it too.

Ask your grocer to stock Seventh Generation, which makes a variety of sustainable products.

For more information on the timber industry, check out the Dogwood Alliance website. It's a great nonprofit whose sole mission is to educate and lobby on behalf of sustainable forestry practices. They have a wealth of information on various campaigns to protect forests and stop destructive corporations.

Or read our last book, Going Green: A Wise Consumer's Guide to a Shrinking Planet. We have a whole section on how to find and choose sustainably made paper and wood products.

Help protect our forests and wildlife habitat! Skip the ridiculous ultra plush and ask your grocer to stop carrying it.

Key words:: plush toilet paper industry timber industry forest products Dogwood Alliance Washington Post ebola virus southern forests clear cuttting pine plantations E.O. Wilson Going Green Sally Kneidel Sadie Kneidel wildlife harvesting forestry roads old growth forests

Sources:
David Fahrenthold. Environmentalists Seek to Wipe Out Plush Toilet Paper. Washington Post. September 24, 2009

Dogwood Alliance, in particular Scot Quaranda of the Dogwood Alliance

Sally Kneidel, PhD, and Sadie Kneidel. Going Green: A Wise Consumer's Guide to a Shrinking Planet. 2008. Fulcrum Publishing

See my previous post about the timber industry and the illegal trade in wildlife.

Scot Quaranda of the Dogwood Alliance, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable forestry practices

Article from the "Hawk Eye" about Sally Kneidel

Dr. Kneidel in her office, with a few of her books

Photo by Caroline Lowe, "Hawk Eye" staff, 2009.
Article by Catherine Schepp, staff writer for the "Hawk Eye," February 2009.

Working in our school's College Center is the author of 11 books, Dr. Sally Kneidel.

Kneidel said that she began writing books after teaching her children’s elementary school classes about insects as a volunteer parent. During her lessons she would help the students conduct experiments and would compile their data. These activities reminded her of how much she had loved writing and compiling data in the process of earning her PhD in Biology/ Ecology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While volunteering in the elementary school, she kept records of all the lessons she designed and soon had enough for a book.

With an agent, she quickly found a publisher for that first book, Creepy Crawlies and the Scientific Method: More than 100 Hands-on Experiments for Children, which has won awards such as Science Books and Films' “Best Books for Children" (1992-1995). She followed that book with a number of others on science education, and on the natural history of small backyard creatures. She wrote several children’s guides to insects, such as Pet Bugs.

She said that her focus changed dramatically when her daughter, Sadie, then a junior in high school, decided to become vegetarian. Kneidel, who was a vegetarian in college herself, said that the family decided that giving up meat was truly the socially responsible thing to do. One thing led to another, and while Sadie was in college, Sadie and Sally began researching and writing together. In researching the environmental impact of livestock, the Kneidels learned that clear-cutting forests to graze livestock and to grow food for the animals contributes more to global warming than transportation does. She said that their realization that more people needed to know about the importance of decreasing their meat consumption led her and Sadie to write a new book.

Co-written by Sadie Kneidel, the book Veggie Revolution: Smart Choices for a Healthy Body and a Healthy Planet deals with their investigation of the poultry, pork and beef industries and the corporate treatment of animals. Kneidel and her daughter went to numerous factory farms and food-processing plants and talked with workers there. These visits led the Kneidels to seek more humane farms that use sustainable methods.

In researching their most recent book, Going-Green-Consumers-Shrinking-Planet, they met local farmers like Cassie Parsons and Natalie Veres, who co-own Grateful Growers Farm where they keep 25 laying hens in each spacious hen house, as opposed to more than one million hens at a Food Lion factory they visited. Going Green focuses mainly on the importance of buying local produce, on environmentally conscience ways to heat and cool homes, and on green transportation.

They also found lists of farmers markets around North Carolina. Kneidel recommends many of these for families seeking high quality organic and local products. Center City Green Market on Seventh Street is convenient for uptown families. Matthews Community Farmers Market offers a variety of foods grown by local farmers within a fifty-mile radius of Matthews. Kneidel said that buying local produce is especially eco-friendly because it minimizes the amount of travel time, fuel, and emissions involved in transporting foods.

If students or parents are interested in any of the books written on the scientific method, vegetarianism or green living written by our very own Dr. Sally Kneidel, they may find them on Amazon.com.

Keywords:: Sally Kneidel

Lice from fish farms attack wild salmon

Wild young salmon burdened with fish-farm lice
Image credit: Alexandra Morton, Science News

Humans wolf down more than 9 million metric tons of farmed fish every year. Lots of consumers believe farmed fish are a more eco-friendly diet choice than wild fish, many of which are declining due to overharvesting and climate change. But a growing body of scientific studies suggest that fish farms, or aquaculture pens, are not friendly at all to aquatic environments or consumers. Fish in crowded pens, just like livestock in crowded pens, are prone to illness and parasites. Farmed fish are customarily doused with fungicides, parasite medicines, antibiotics, and dyes to render their flesh an appetizing color. All of these substances leak out into the surrounding waters.

One recent study, presented February 15 at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, concluded that fish farms in the Pacific Northwest are dangerous to wild salmon. When inch-long young pink salmon and chum salmon swim down the area's coastal rivers toward the ocean, many pass fish farms or aquaculture pens in coastal inlets. These wild juveniles often pick up sea lice that are abundant in the crowded aquaculture pens and drift outside the pens.

The lice suck blood from the tiny fish, and the wounds are also an opening for harmful bacteria and viruses. According to Martin Krkošek of the University of Washington in Seattle, mortality to wild young salmon passing by lice-infested fish farms can be as high as 95 percent.

In addition to making the young fish sick, the parasite load also affects their predator-avoidance behaviors, so that the young salmon are more likely to be eaten by predatory birds and bigger fish. Experiments have shown that while healthy young salmon dart away from a bird diving into the water, the lice-laden youngsters take longer to seek shelter and are thus more vulnerable. The lice-burdened little salmon are also less likely to seek shelter inside a fish school, straggling along on the outside of the school instead, where they are quickly picked off by predatory fish.

Says Felipe Cabello of New York Medical College in Valhalla, who also presented at the conference, fish farms are the new frontier of excessive antibiotic use. Factory farms for livestock have long been criticized for feeding 70% of the United States' antibiotics to poultry, hogs, and cattle simply for weight gain, a practice that contributes to the growing immunity of bacteria to antibiotics. Fish farms are now exacerbating the problem.

Fish farming was once seen as a way to avoid overharvesting wild fish, and to feed the world’s growing population. But many scientists now say that farms should concentrate on shellfish and on fish that are low on the food chain. Farming carnivores such as salmon doesn't make sense, because more fish must be taken from oceans to feed the farmed salmon than is produced by the farms.

John Volpe of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, who also presented at the conference, is on a research team that’s trying to assess the sustainability of aquaculture. The Global Aquaculture Performance Index evaluates a country’s fish farms using several parameters, such as water quality and the amount of disease and parasites. The global production of farmed fish is growing, and most of the farmed fish are high in the food chain and need to be fed other fish. It's not sustainable, nor does it make sense. "It's farming the tigers of the sea," Volpe says.

Source: Rachel Ehrenberg. "Lice-laced salmon are easy dinner." Science News. March 14, 2009.

For more information on fish farms, see our book Going Green and our previous post on the subject. Sally Kneidel, PhD

This post now syndicated on Fox Business online

Keywords:: salmon fish farms aquaculture sustainability Sally Kneidel fish lice Science News antibiotic immunity Fox Business

Taking Rosa's good advice, we veered up the road into Huaraz and the Peruvian Andes

Rosa looked concerned. "Why are you going to Huancayo?" she asked, brow furrowed. Rosa Vasquez Zanetti runs a travel agency out of her family's inn where we were staying, on the Amazon River in Iquitos Peru. Rosa had been so helpful already, I'd asked her to look over our plans for the Andes.

"We picked Huancayo at random - because it's a small mountain town with no Americans, and not too far from Lima by bus," I answered.

"But...that's not the best plan," Rosa continued, in her soft-spoken way. "For birding and trekking, you should go to Huaraz in the Cordillera Blanca. And you should ride the Cruz del Sur bus from Lima. It travels during the day and makes no stops so it's safer." Night buses that make frequent stops are vulnerable to occasional muggings, as we heard from more than one source.

a view of Huaraz from Zarela's hostel

"Stay at Zarela's hostel in Huaraz for a couple of days to get acclimated," Rosa told us. "Then from there, you can go up to Llanganuco Lodge and Llanganuco Lake. You'll like that better than Huancayo."

Rosa arranged it all. As it turns out, the Cruz del Sur bus does make pit stops on request (the onboard bathroom is for liquids only, the driver announced). But no scheduled stops. And it didn't freak me out like I feared it would, swooping around mountain curves with no guard rails. I just didn't look out the window.

kids of a Huaraz street vendor

We loved Huaraz - at 10,200 feet, the highest place we'd ever spent the night. (Click for map.) We loved La Casa de Zarela too, a first-class backpackers' hostel with hot water, great views, and helpful staff, especially spunky owner Zarela Zamora (online reviews and contact info). Most of the guests staying there left early in the morning on treks or climbs arranged by one of the local trekking companies. Huaraz (and Zarela's) are featured in Outside Magazine as the mecca for mountain adventurers in the northern Peruvian Andes. Nestled between the Cordillera Negra (brown peaks) and the Cordillera Blanca (frosted peaks), Huaraz is within spitting distance of some of the world's highest summits. The Cordillera Blanca has more than 50 peaks of 5700 m (18,700 feet) or higher. North America has only three; Europe none. (Click here for a Huaraz trekker's online journal entry.)

Much of the adobe town was leveled by an earthquake in 1970 that killed 20,000 people in Huaraz alone - half the population. The town has been rebuilt, this time with rebar reinforcement in every wall. In fact, a good proportion of the homes and buildings still have rebar poking out the top. But the funky construction and the steep cobbled streets just add to the town's personality - a blend of local enterprise and Andean indigenous culture, along with the trekkers, birders, and wanderers like ourselves.

a Huaraz weaver and her alpaca

I spent our time in Huaraz skulking around the town, trying to get pics of Andean street scenes and the beautiful Quechua women who were everywhere, with their long thick braids and brilliantly colored hand-woven clothes and baby-slings. In the afternoons and evenings, indigenous women from outlying farms and villages set up stands or spread blankets on the sidewalk to sell produce or woven items. They all wore traditional fedora-style hats, often with an arrangement of feathers lying flat against the felt. Most of the women didn't want their picture taken, even when I asked politely. But a few acquiesced, a couple of them even asked me to mail them prints. It was a blissful day for me, I can't say why exactly - one of those few days where the world seems a lovely place; I felt grateful to be alive and well.































































After just one day of acclimating in Huaraz, and scampering about annoying people with my camera, we hired a taxi driver from Yungay to take us to Llanganuco Lodge at 11,500 feet, and later Llanganuco Lake (12,500 feet) in Huascarán National Park. The lodge is right smack at the base of snow-covered peaks Huascarán and Huandoy. At 22,200 feet, Huascarán is the highest tropical peak in the world. I'll tell you about the National Park and the lodge - and altitude sickness - in my next post. Between our amoeba issues along the Amazon and altitude sickness in the Andes, we had a few sick days. But that's all forgotten now. I said in my previous post that I'd move to Iquitos in a heartbeat; I'll have to include Huaraz as well. If a job opened in either place, I'd be gone in a flash.

Huascarán by Alan Kneidel

All other photos, and text, by Sally Kneidel

Keywords:: Huaraz, Andes, trekking, trek, climbing, Huascaran, Llanganuco, Pascana Amazon Services, Rosa Vasquez, Quechua, La Pascana, Zarela, Zarela's, alpaca, Kneidel, Sally Kneidel, Alan Kneidel