Kentucky Fried Extinction

Firstly, this title was borrowed from an e-mail I got from Greenpeace, an environmental group whose goal is to “ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity".

This e-mail brought up two very important issues. One would be the deliberate destruction of rainforests, and two could be the extinction of the Sumatran tiger as a result of lost habitat.

Yes, I know it’s just such stuff as this that brands people as tree huggers, but what do I care? Trees and humans have had a symbiotic relationship for so long. We each survive on parts of the atmosphere the other cannot use. So as long as trees are helping to make the atmosphere conducive to life, I won’t apologize for wanting to live in a world where they are included.

Oh, and in our part of the world, trees also help disperse water from a heavy rain so it doesn’t cause a flash flood and needlessly destroy houses and upset people’s lives. It’s when forests are clear cut that these natural disasters occur. But those who live on Harless Creek know that.

But back to the title of this piece: Kentucky Fried Chicken is doing business with a major contributor to rain forest destruction; it gets the paper for its packaging from Asia Pulp & Paper (AP&P).

This destruction takes place throughout Asia, but AP&P is hitting Indonesia particularly hard. Not only are they destroying this nation’s invaluable rain forests, they are destroying the habitat of the last remaining subspecies of tiger found here.

It was as recently as 80 years ago that Indonesia was the home of three such subspecies. Two are now extinct, and the one remaining subspecies, the Sumatran tiger has been classified as on the brink of extinction. One reason for this is that 93% of the tigers’ habitat has already been destroyed. And without their natural habitat, those few that are left cannot survive for long.

Why does Kentucky Fried do business with AP&P? Possibly because it’s a cheap source of paper for their packaging. It’s just too bad their need for packaging material for body parts of a dead chicken that have been coated with 11 secret herbs and spices and deep-fried is allowed to endanger Sumatran tigers and their habitat.

Of course, a much better source for that packaging paper would be available to Kentucky Fried if the U S hadn’t outlawed a superior source of paper and categorized it as a schedule one drug.

It has been pointed out in this column many times that one acre of industrial hemp will provide as much paper as 4.1 acres of trees, without the chemical pollution produced by the process that turns wood pulp into paper. And hemp can be ready for more production in a much shorter time. In fact, in Kentucky, when it was legal to do so, a good farmer could get several crops of hemp in, in a single planting season.

Trees by comparison take around 20-30 years to recover.

Well, this was done before we were made aware of the fact that hemp is a dangerous drug that needs to be listed with narcotics such as heroin and cocaine. Of course, when that was made known, we all happily abandoned the idea of ever using industrial hemp again.