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8 Comments

news

Bigger, Softer & Clearcut

By Jonathan Goldsbie

2008_4_10APuppyIsAmbivalent.jpg

Kleercut
WARNING!
Contains clearcut ancient forests
www.kleercut.net

When CBS Outdoor wrapped St. George station in vinyl ads promoting a certain brand of facial tissue, Greenpeace’s Kleercut campaign decided to tackle the omnipresent sales pitch by generously sprinkling the premises with doses of perspective, reminding subway riders that the softness of Kimberly-Clark’s products comes at the expense of unsustainably-harvested ancient forests, including the Boreal. To Kimberly-Clark, puppies may be adorable, but caribou, eagles, bears, and wolves, on the other hand, are unfortunately expendable.

Comments

  • Ben

    Demanding virgin hardwood for greater tissue softness is pretty extravagant. It reminds me of the justification for eating veal, that “I couldn’t enjoy life without it.”

  • David Newland

    BEN – The boreal forest is mostly softwood, not hardwood. But yeah, it’s pretty silly to use boreal lumber for nose-blowing and bum-wiping.

  • Ben

    It felt hard to me. My mistake.

  • David Newland

    People say LOL without meaning it… but wow, I just Laughed Out Loud!

  • andrewpmk

    The government needs to legislate a minimum recycled content for paper. Making disposable paper towels, toilet paper and tissue paper with anything less than 100% recycled paper is unacceptable.

  • rek

    Recycled != Post-consumer Waste
    When something factory-made says it contains x% recycled material, that just means they swept up the cuttings that fell on the floor and made another widget from it. It could still be straight from a strip mine/virgin forest/whatever.
    Post-consumer means it spent a night in your blue or grey bin.

  • rek

    Some, maybe all, of the stickers have been removed.

  • Jonathan Goldsbie

    I know, rek. I held off my post until most of the stickers had been taken down, because I didn’t want to be the one responsible for informing CBS, Kimberly-Clark, and/or the TTC that their ads had been jammed.
    Totally by coincidence, fewer than two hours after my post went up I got an email from the Greenpeace Canada mailing list:

    New report: Logging in Canada’s Boreal Forest could trigger “carbon bomb” impacting global climate

    A new report released by Greenpeace today finds that logging in Canada’s Boreal Forest is making global warming worse by releasing greenhouse gases and reducing carbon storage. It also finds that logging makes the forest more susceptible to global warming impacts like wildfires and insect outbreaks, which in turn release more greenhouse gases.

    Read the report at: http://www.greenpeace.ca/turninguptheheat

    Turning Up the Heat: Global Warming and the Degradation of Canada’s Boreal Forest collects the best available scientific literature of the past decade. It warns that if current trends continue, they could culminate in a scenario known as the “carbon bomb”: a massive and sudden release of greenhouse gases driven by an outbreak of forest or peat fires. Because the Boreal contains so much carbon—186 billion tonnes—this could affect the climate on a global scale.

    But the report offers solutions as well. It finds that by making intact areas of the Boreal Forest off-limits to logging and other industrial activity, we can help avert the carbon bomb scenario, while safeguarding the health and viability of the ecosystem as a whole. Intact areas of the Boreal Forest resist and recover from fires, insect outbreaks, and other impacts better than fragmented areas. They also give trees, plants, and animals the best chances of migrating, adapting, and surviving in a changing climate.