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.  According to a January 2012 report published by the Forest Products Association of Canada, “Canada’s forest products industry plants 650 million seedlings annually to regenerate harvested areas and areas lost to fire and insects to sustain the forests’ long-term health. This represents 45 per cent of all new trees grown, with the remainder resulting from natural regeneration (53 per cent) or direct seeding (2 per cent).” Why should you care? Well, yes, paper kills trees, but just about any product made from any agricultural crop kills something (fruit could be the exception). What’s important is the extent to which those crops are grown and harvested sustainably, the meaning of “sustainably” referring to the extent to which an industry can sustain itself. That is, are crops being rapaciously harvested without any thought to future harvests? What those sustainable practices are can be open for debate—for years, various fishing industries insisted that their, say, cod fishing practices were sustainable...until the cod were fished out and the industry collapsed. Any agricultural product has the potential to be responsibly and sustainably managed—or, conversely, run irresponsibly and unsustainably. The consequences of the latter are often moribund industries, markets, and/or companies. For more Two Sides facts see www.twosides.us/mythsandfacts.