Bottoms up!

I was planning on giving this post the title "conservation vs. the economy" but as I kept thinking about it, it doesn't have to be that way. As Al Gore pointed out in An Inconvenient Truth, there should be no set of scales with Earth on one side and gold bars on the other, ever trying to find some balance between the two. But I started thinking: Say a company reduces it's paper consumption by half. The paper supplier will lose that much business, and that much less of a tree will be made into paper. Not much impact here, but if you apply this concept to the entire economy, there may be some problems. If every company which currently uses paper reduces their consumption by half, then each part of the paper supply chain will lose half of its business. So we should keep using paper, right?

Wrong. This type of 'bottom-up' or grassroots thinking forces change. In small amounts, there is little impact. But if enough people set their printers to "duplex" then everybody above the consumer will be impacted. There are plenty of examples of this happening, and it seems to work well. Industry is forced to adapt, change, or quit. If this were the way all things happened, we might not even have large monopolies like we do now. My initial cynical view of this was that if we all use less paper, half of the people in the industry will lose their jobs. It's not a perfect way to solve problems, but it sure does keep those with power (and/or money) on their toes.