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While standing in mild trepidation at the check-out counter you hear a meager voice from what seems like a far distant land quietly inquire "Paper or plastic, Ma'am?" Your already briskly-paced heart nearly bursts out of your chest cavity as a voice inside your head screams "No, no, oh God please not those!" Speaking through chattering teeth as you fight off the nearly-overwhelming urge to fall to the floor and suffer through a series of epileptic seizures you hear your trembling voice utter: "Neither, thank you."

It is then that the bagger finally notices the reusable burlap sacks in your cart and you are saved from any further explanation. You breathe a sigh of relief as the bagger and cashier shoot one another poorly disguised glances which carry an unspoken message that seems to translate as "check out this looney."

While we all have known for quite some time that plastic grocery bags are a horrendous problem for the environment, what has been overlooked is that paper bags are equally as destructive. I know this may be somewhat elementary for those readers who are perhaps a bit more environmentally savvy, but paper bags are made from paper, which is made from trees. Trees are cut down by huge companies like Weyerhauser and others who dilligently run around, clear-cutting the last of the less than five percent of ancient forests remaining in North America, while simultaneously laying waste to vast expanses of rainforest in the Amazon and elsewhere.

Clearcutting is bad (obviously) for the environment because it not only kills ALL of the trees in any given area - which would be bad enough - but it also kills EVERYTHING that lives in, on or around those trees. Non-tree plants do not escape, nor do any of the animals that live in underground burrows or anywhere in the entire portion of clear-cut forest. It's worse than just the simple problem of habitat destruction. The problem is bigger than a bunch of homeless and hungry squirells and chipmunks. Clearcuts turn the entire landscape into a deadzone, and the soil itself becomes toxic because there is such a wide-ranging conversion from the living to the dead that all the rotting plant-matter and, soon after, animal-matter makes it impossible for anything except perhaps gangrene and other flesh-eating bacterias and fungii to live there.

The seemingly noble (but in reality little more than symbolic) efforts to reseed these areas consistently fail because the soil becomes too toxic for anything to grow in. Yes, dead

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