WhatTheyThink's Going Green has joined forces with Two Sides to help address the "perceptions" that paper destroys forests, that electronic media are "greener" than print and paper, and that recycling is the solution to all environmental ills.
From Two Sides UK, this caught my attention:
according to a 2009 Greenpeace report called “Slaughtering the Amazon,” the largest amount of annual deforestation occurs in the Brazilian Amazon, and—holy cow!—the biggest cause of it is cattle, says the Brazilian government: “‘Cattle are responsible for about 80% of all deforestation’ in the Amazon region. In recent years, on average one hectare of Amazon rainforest has been lost to cattle ranchers every 18 seconds. The cattle sector in the Brazilian Amazon is responsible for 14% of the world's annual deforestation.”
Why should you care?
Funny how you never see cautions and caveats saying “Think about the environment before you have a burger,” even though what‘s inside a fast food take out bag has probably helped cause more environmental devastation than the paper the bag is made of. This is not to say that we should have any beef with beef—if you read
Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you know that there are a wide variety of environmental issues with beef, domestic and foreign—but that, as with print and paper, there are good and bad, sustainable and unsustainable, practices. Or, you could take the advice of the Chik-Fil-A cows and “
Eat mor chikin.”
For more Two Sides facts see
www.twosides.us/mythsandfacts.
About Richard Romano
Richard Romano is Managing Editor of WhatTheyThink. He curates the Wide Format section on WhatTheyThink.com. He has been writing about the graphic communications industry for more than 25 years. He is the author or coauthor of more than half a dozen books on printing technology and business. His most recent book is “Beyond Paper: An Interactive Guide to Wide-Format and Specialty Printing.