Will There Ever be a Last Tree?

Reading Robert Pinsky's poem, Shirt, made me think about all the things in my life that I use without even thinking about how many other people are effected by them. I have a reusable water bottle that I have with me all the time, so I don't buy plastic water bottles. I try to recycle as much as possible, and I try to reduce instead of reusing. But I have overlooked something: when I bring a lunch to school, without thinking about it, I use paper bags. It seems obvious that a paper bag can be recycled, and yet, I never put that into perspective with a normal sheet of paper of a pop can that I would always recycle. Every year 4 billion trees are cut down for paper, that's 10 million a day, and currently the ratio of trees to person in the world is about 61:1. Now imagine how many paper products are used by just the US, just Chicago, just New Trier, just you. Without even knowing it we are killing off forests around the world. It's true that people need some paper products, but I don't see the ends justifying the means. People also believe that cures to diseases can be found in nature, but what if it is lost by the logging. Because of my use of paper bags, loggers are working for bad pay in all weather conditions, near falling trees and with dangerous equipment. Because of my use of paper bags, more trees are being cut down than necessary. Because of my use of paper bags, we may never know if that cure was out there. That one last tree could be the tree with a cure, it could be the tree that hurts a logger, it could be the tree that had the last of an endangered species. That one last tree will never be the last tree.

If you look closely at the cartoon above, you may notice that there is a crocodile piled up with the trees. Logging is done so routinely and so blindly that people don't even think about the consequences of it, and humans aren't the only ones affected.