by Ian Sansom
The charge sheet is long and complicated, but even if the paper companies could acquit themselves entirely, and wood resources were inexhaustible, and all forests forever sustainably managed, paper manufacturing would still pose a threat to the world’s future, because the mass industrial production processes use so many other finite resources, including water, minerals, metals and fuels. “Making a single sheet of A4 paper,” according to Haggith, “not only causes as much greenhouse gas emissions as burning a lightbulb for an hour, it also uses a mugful of water.” (Industry figures suggest that it takes about forty thousand liters of water to make a ton of paper, though much of that water is recycled.) With our delicious, decadent daily diet of newspapers, magazines, Post-it notes, toilet and kitchen rolls, we are guzzling down gallons of water and eating up electricity: we have grown fat and become obese on paper. In the UK, average annual paper consumption per person is around two hundred kg. (approximately 441 lbs.); in America it’s closer to three hundred kg. (approximately 661 lbs.); and in Finland—whose paper industry accounts for 15 percent of the world’s total production—it’s even more. Consumption in China is currently a mere fifty kg. (approximately 110 lbs.) per person, but gaining fast. World paper consumption is now approaching a million tons per day—and most of this, after its short useful life, ends up in landfill. One way or another, and indisputably according to Haggith, “We treat paper with utter contempt.”
Which is odd, because we absolutely love trees. In fact, we worship them—not dendrologists, but dendrolators. In The Golden Bough (1890), that massive, mad compendium of myths and rituals, James Frazer has a whole chapter on the worship of trees, listing rituals for just about every human and nonhuman experience, from birth to marriage to death and rebirth, ad infinitum. The Golden Bough is of course itself named after the story from the Aeneid, in which Aeneas and the Sibyl are required to present a golden bough to Charon, in order to cross the river Styx and thus gain access, through Limbo and Tartarus, to the Elysian Fields, where Aeneas is reunited with his father, Anchises. Trees grant us access to underworlds and other worlds also in Norse mythology, with Yggdrasil, the World Tree, a giant ash that connects all the worlds, and from which Odin is sacrificed by being hanged, before being resurrected and granted the gift of divine sight. Stories of special, sacred and cosmic trees abound in religion, in history and in legend: Augustine is converted under a fig tree; Newton is inspired under an apple tree; the Buddha under the Bo tree; Wordsworth “under this dark sycamore,” composing “Tintern Abbey”; and in the eighteenth century a large elm tree in Boston, the so-called Liberty Tree, became the symbol of resistance to British rule over the American colonies.
If the tree is a site of personal enlightenment and a symbol of emancipation, then woods and forests are places of enchantment that can and often do represent entire peoples, nations, and indeed the world as a whole. In Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House, to my Lord Fairfax” (1651), for example, often read as an allegory on the English Civil War, the narrator takes “sanctuary in the wood,” where “The arching boughs unite between/The columns of temple green”—the wood as a place of safety where one can take stock, rethink and reimagine. Similarly, in Italo Calvino’s fabulous novel The Baron in the Trees (1957), set in Liguria in the eighteenth century, the young Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò climbs up into a tree in order to escape his tormenting family and to gain perspective on the world: he likes it so much up there that he decides to stay.
A yearning for arboreal existence is no mere fairy tale—although it is also, often, a fairy tale (the tales of the Brothers Grimm, for example, feature a veritable forest of forests, so much so that they might be said to grow not from German folktales but direct from German soil). An extraordinary number of recent books celebrate trees and woodlands in near mystical fashion. Colin Tudge, in The Secret Life of Trees: How They Live and Why They Matter (2005), argues that “without trees our species would not have come into being at all.” Richard Mabey, in Beechcombings: The Narratives of Trees (2007), sees trees as witnesses to human history, “dense with time.” And Roger Deakin, in Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees (2007), provides a personal account of how trees teach us about ourselves and each other, the forest not as a mirror to nature, but the mirror of nature. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” proclaimed Thoreau, long ago, in Walden, Or, Life in the Woods (1854), “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
And here perhaps lies the source of our contemporary guilt and confusion about turning trees into paper; here is the heart of the sylvan darkness. It’s not that we can’t see the wood for the trees: we can’t even see the trees. When we gaze into the forest mirror we see ourselves. The anthropologist Maurice Bloch, in an article, “Why Trees, Too, are Good to Think With: Towards an Anthropology of the Meaning of Life” (1998), argues that “the symbolic power of trees comes from the fact that they are good substitutes for humans.” Are we human? Or are we dryad? In the growth and maturation of a tree we are reminded of the growth and maturation of a person. In tree parts, for better and for worse, we see body parts: branches, limbs; leaves, hair; bark, skin; trunk, torso; sap, blood. Lavinia, in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, has her hands, “her two branches,” “lopp’d” and “hew’d”; in his poem “Tree at My Window,” Robert Frost has Fate put man and tree together, “Your head so much concerned with outer/Mine with inner, weather.” Living trees clearly symbolize the regeneration and continuation of human life: the transformation of wood into paper is therefore a kind of self-annihilation, a diabolical transformation, the reverse of the transformation of the wine into the blood of Christ during Mass. Black Mass = white sheet. In one of the most extraordinary passages about tree worship in the whole of The Golden Bough, Frazer writes:
How serious the worship was in former times may be gathered from the ferocious penalty appointed by the old German laws for such as dared to peel the bark of a standing tree. The culprit’s navel was to be cut out and nailed to a part of the tree which he had peeled and he was to be driven round and round the tree until all his guts were wound around its trunk. The intention of the punishment clearly was to replace the dead bark by a living substitute; it was a life for a life, the life of a man for the life of a tree.
Such narratives and fantasies of punishment and self-punishment characterize much contemporary Western nature writing, which often reads like an experiment in narcissism, in that true sense of Narcissus being unable to distinguish between himself and his reflection. The theoretical branch of nature writing is a form of literary criticism called ecopoetics (from the Greek “oikos,” home or dwelling place, and “poiesis,” making), which wrestles with difficult issues of selfhood and self-sufficiency. According to Jonathan Bate, one of the most brilliant proponents of ecopoetics, “our inner ecology cannot be sustained without the health of ecosystems.” In his book The Song of the Earth (2000), a tour de force, or at least a tour de chant, Bate argues that “The dream of deep ecology will never be realized upon the earth, but our survival as a species may be dependent on our capacity to dream it in the work of our imagination.” The means by which we might do this, according to Bate, borrowing his terms from the American poet Gary Snyder and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, is to understand works of art as “imaginary states of nature, imaginary ideal ecosystems, and by reading them, by inhabiting them, we can start to imagine what it might be like to live differently upon the earth.” In a riddling conclusion to his book, Bate writes that “If mortals dwell in that they save the earth and if poetry is the original admission of dwelling, then poetry is the place where we save the earth.”
Book plate of Erich Saffert, Doctor of Agriculture and Forestry Surveying, Austria, early twentieth century
Bookplate of Erich Saffert Sieglinde Robinson
Bad news: poetry is probably not the place where we will save the earth. And there is prob
ably little evidence either for Bate’s contention that “mortals dwell in that they save the earth.” Mortals dwell, rather—or certainly have dwelt—in that they use the earth, from the Romans and the Saxons clearing British woodland for developing iron-smelting works, to the development of Forstwissenschaft (forest science) in Germany, where algebra and geometry combined to produce a kind of mathematics of the forest, by which foresters could calculate volumes of wood and timber and therefore plan for felling and replanting. Ecopoetics yearns for oneness with the natural world, but all of our experience suggests that separation from nature—domination, despoliation—is the norm.
So how to continue in this difficult relationship? How to find our way through the gloom? How to dwell with forests and with paper? Might we perhaps restrict ourselves solely to rotefallen, or wyndfallen wood, so-called cablish (from the Latin “cableicium,” or “cablicium”), in order to provide ourselves with fuel and with fiber for our books? Should we all become little Thoreaus, building cabins from small white pines? Perhaps we should further investigate alternatives to wood pulp in paper production—alternatives that include sustainable crops such as hemp, straw, flax and kenaf? At the very least we should respect our paper—if nothing else, as a sign of respect for ourselves.
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WALKING PAPERS
walking-orders, -papers, -ticket. A (notice of ) dismissal: US (1830s); partly anglicised, esp. in the Colonies, in c.20 . Joc.
ERIC PARTRIDGE, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (8th edn., 1984)
Woodcut map printed on paper, sixteenth century
Redrawn from Capability Brown’s plan for Burghley House
Plan of Burghley House © The Omnipotent Magician, Jane Brown, Chatto & Windus
Maps are drawn by men and not turned out automatically by machines, wrote the geographer J.K. Wright in his classic essay “Map Makers are Human” in 1942. Times have changed: these days, maps are turned out automatically by machines, or at least by humans using machines known as Geographic Information Systems (GIS), the computer hardware and software that’s used to capture, store and display geographical and topographical data and which, according to one standard introduction to GIS, “is changing the world and almost everything in it.” Computer mapping systems were first developed by the Canadian government and then at Harvard University during the 1960s, and by now we’re all accustomed to maps that we can simply download, pinch, zoom and click rather than scribble on, fold and leave to rot at the bottom of a rucksack: atlases at our fingertips, giant globes in our pockets. Logically, the paper map should already be consigned to the glove compartment of history. But it isn’t.
This may be due to the fact that people simply like the look and feel of paper maps—with some people of course liking the look and feel of them much more than others. In 2006, a man called Edward Forbes Smiley III was jailed for stealing more than a hundred maps, worth $3 million, from collections at Yale, Harvard and the British Library. Smiley sliced the maps out of books using a razor blade, in much the same fashion as another famous map thief, Gilbert Bland, an antiques dealer from Florida, apparently as unassuming as his name, who was in fact, according to his biographer, the “Al Capone of cartography”—though without the violence, bootlegging, bribery and late-stage neurosyphilis. Bland, like Smiley, was really just a petty thief with a taste for antique paper.
So why do people steal maps? For the same reason they steal money and books, of course: because they’re paper marked with symbols that make them valuable. But perhaps more especially, people steal maps because a map is a symbol of conquest, so the theft of a map somehow represents the ultimate conquest: the possession of the means of possession, as it were. At least, that’s my theory. No gangster mapper, I have to admit that the temptation to snaffle old paper maps has occasionally been all but overwhelming: the seventeenth-century, gold-enriched, hand-colored, multitinted maps issued by Willem Janszoon Blaeu and sons, for example, on display in the Dutch Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, are so extraordinary and so exquisite that only the most dimly pixel-fixated could fail to feel the stirrings of desire (Blaeu had to design and build his own printing presses in order to produce work of such quality). Or the maps produced by Christopher Saxton under the authority of Queen Elizabeth in the sixteenth century, the first ever maps of the English counties, beautiful, simple, restrained, lovingly handcrafted by engravers and artists imported from the map-pioneering Low Countries, and popularly reproduced on playing cards. Or John Seller’s seventeenth-century sea charts: full-fathom masterpieces. Or the maps of the great Sanson family of France—no relation—whose work, in the words of one authority, was “always dignified and attractive, with an ornamental cartouche.” If only.
Even my own modest collection of Half-Inch Bartholomew maps, with their tweedy Edinburgh elegance, have a kind of satisfying thickness to them, a fullness, like a wooden jigsaw puzzle, or an old Bakelite radio, a reminder that things were somehow heavier and thicker, more substantial, in the old days. The past always seems to weigh more—because often it did. My Bartholomew maps, some of them over a hundred years old and of printed paper mounted on linen, barely show their age except for a little fraying at the edges, and still sit sturdily in the hand on long hikes, like Arthur Wainwright’s ubiquitous pipe, or a greaseproof wrap of sandwiches. It just seems natural to find one’s way using a printed map—presumably because for centuries people have indeed navigated their way with paper, so we have become accustomed to them guiding us toward our destination: map reading another of our many ingrained paper habits. In an article in the Journal of Environmental Psychology in 2008, “Wayfinding with a GPS-Based Mobile Navigation System: A Comparison with Maps and Direct Experience,” Dr. Toru Ishikawa, a cognitive-behavioral geographer at the University of Tokyo, found that pedestrians using GPS devices made more errors than those using paper maps (but that people using paper maps made more errors than those who were shown the route in person). Dr. Ishikawa has also studied how people view art in museums using both audiovisual aids and traditional guidebooks and floor plans: those using the new technology tend to forget what they’ve seen more quickly than those using the traditional guides. Good old paper, man’s best friend, trotting along beside us like a faithful retriever.
It can even be relied upon in virtual realms. In the Super Mario series of video games, for example—which includes the excellent Paper Mario, Super Paper Mario, Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, and the spin-off Mario and Luigi series—part of the appeal and attraction is not only that Mario can fold up into a paper plane, and a paper boat, feats that are of course excellent and impressive in themselves, but also that he often navigates the bewildering virtual world with a trusty map in his white-gloved hand: an intrepid mustachioed explorer, Mario is also our guide. For homemade Mario-style mapping, an Italian self-styled “jedi architect and media master” called Iacopo Boccalari has created a simple method for turning dull on-screen Google Maps into paper-looking on-screen Google maps (see www.iacopoboccalari.com), while MapsOnPaper.com, run by a Swedish design agency, will transform a screen-friendly map into a printer-friendly format. Paper remains the ghost in the machine. Metaphorically.
Map illustrating a historical event
Literally. Recently, the increased availability of open-source data and mapping tools has allowed people to make their own maps: in the now customary Web 2.0 fashion, map consumers have become map producers. This new kind of mapmaking is sometimes called neocartography, and in 2004 a man called Steve Coast became one of the first digital neocartographers when he created something called OpenStreetMap (OSM), the Wikipedia of maps. Using a cheap handheld GPS device, Coast set out to create a map that could be made freely available, without copyright restrictions, and that could be added to and edited by others. In the words of its mission statement, OpenStreetMap is “dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free geospatial data and to providing geospatial data for anybody to use and share.” What’s amazi
ng is that the using and sharing of geospatial data via OSM still requires paper in order to work effectively. Not everyone has the cutting-edge digital tools or cartographic instincts or training to be able to add meaningful details to digital maps, so various methods of contributing to OSM maps have quickly evolved, including the so-called Walking Papers method, which allows people to print OSM maps on paper, add details to them with a pen, and then scan them back onto the map using the OSM web-based software. It’s easy: we’re all neocartographers now. And, crucially, it isn’t just a hobby for wannabe geographers.
Kibera is a massive slum in Nairobi, Kenya: estimates of its population range from 200,000 to more than a million. In 2008 the independent Map Kibera Project, organized by an Italian academic, Stefano Marras, began mapping Kibera using the Walking Papers method, with the aim of producing reliable, up-to-date maps for use by the inhabitants of this ever-changing city. Local children are trained in basic GPS technology, in order to be able to capture the geographical data of an area using handheld devices, and organizers and volunteers then print out A1-size maps using this data so that others can then use tracing paper and sets of colored markers to add important details such as the location of markets, sewers, pathways and streams. This marked-up paper map is then photographed and copied to a computer, the original map is updated, and large numbers of the maps are printed for distribution: a dynamic digital-paper-digital-paper flow.
