Of Trees and Toilet Paper

It’s ironic to be a writer concerned with climate change who uses, at least at the late stages when books may get published on paper, a product made from the pulp of our climate change salvor. If trees are at least one of our salvations, then cutting them down to make paper for books is hypocritical. It’s probably better to save a tree than to write a book. But, the amount of trees turned to paper for books pales in comparison to the number of trees used for toilet paper. Charmin and other super-soft brands pulp one redwood tree into 1500 rolls of toilet paper. Americans use about 100 rolls per year. One redwood tree supplies the paper for 15 people’s butts for one year. Americans on average read 12 books a year. I would give a lot for the toilet paper to be made from bamboo or hemp and for people to read 100 books per year. But if wishes were fishes, we’d swim in the sea.

At first, the news reported a man living in his truck committed arson in a part of the Coconino National Forest right next to Flagstaff. A white pick-up with Louisiana plates had been spotted in the forest where the fire began. I asked my good friend’s husband, who flies helicopters to fight fires, how they would be able to know if it was arson or not. He said, “Fire investigators do incredible work, figuring these things out.”

He was right. Just a few hours later the investigators concluded the man hadn’t intentionally set the fire. Instead, he had been camping in the forest and not wanting to litter, burned the toilet paper he used the day before and stowed the paper under a rock. The paper smoldered overnight and, the next day, when the wind came up, sparks flew toward the trees who were suffering from the dry needles on the forest floor. At first, the fire burned only an acre, but wind plus mega-drought plus ashamed-to-litter toilet paper turned the single acre to a thousand, then three, then four, then five thousand total acres. The fire edged closer and closer to town. Fire fighters began to evacuate people. They set up a shelter at Max’s middle school but fortunately, few people needed it. Thanks to a bit of rain, the fire didn’t cross the highway or leap into the crown of the next wildly dry batch of trees. They called this 5,000 acre burn, the 3rd wildfire that year, the Pipeline Fire but you can Google Toilet Paper Fire and find the same results.

Making toilet paper from garbage and grass, combining short fibers of old paper with the long fibers of grass, making paper by cross-hatching the core of papyrus plants, is art. It’s work, to make art. It’s also work to cut down a tree but to take a life-giving tree and pulping it into bleached sludge is more like making excrement than art. To take a being of multiplicity, something that supports soil and birds, forms mushrooms, stores carbon, that come back from the fire dead, as my friend, the eco-science researcher

George Koch said of the redwood fires,“to rebuild a crown of vigorous green foliage after losing everything,” flattening it into single-colored reams and rolls of paper is a definition of death.

Is all true art a kind of recycling? To make art is to transform something from the muck of your mind, the crud of your past, the gunk of experience, the rubbish of shame and layering it in horizontal then vertical layers until the surface shines smooth and bright, silvering into an image or a mirror, shimmering in duplicate, triplicate, four, all the prismatic, luminescent edges, corners, planes, faces, nuances of this ever-expanding world. What if you don’t have an art or you lost yours along the way? What if your forest has never been terribly resilient. Suffering from drought and pestilence, it is primed to burn from the start. What if the trees across the way can’t sense your nutrient needs, or worse, what if the mycelia in the forest can’t understand your call? If you don’t have the energy to grow toward the light, you can’t photosynthesize. If you can’t photosynthesize, you can’t store any carbon in your core. Your roots, loosened, become further unanchored in every wind. When the fires come, the flames lap at your thin bark. We can’t save all the trees. But by amending the soil, changing the story, we can save some of them.