Paper: An Elegy. Ian Sansom

had to answer various questions, and the cards on which our answers had been entered were fed into the school’s computer – an Oracle? – which eventually delivered its verdict on a till-type print-out. And so we children of Essex were taught to aim for careers as secretaries, receptionists, cabbies and mechanics. I was lucky. My destiny, apparently, was to work in forestry. Youth Training Schemes were available.

      Thirty years later, and having barely set foot in a forest since, except for the occasional hike and adventure in Epping Forest, and in the fictional woods and groves of Greek myth and Arthurian Romance, as well as in the Hundred Acre Wood, and Where the Wild Things Are and The Gruffalo, I realise that I am in fact up to my neck in the leafy depths, drowning in the loam. Not a forester, but certainly a child of the forest, a denizen of the dusky dells and ferny floors. Wood is my fuel: this morning alone I came home with two reams of copier paper, two Silvine reporter’s notebooks, some gummed envelopes, five HB pencils, a Belfast Telegraph, a Daily Telegraph, a Guardian, The Times, a Daily Mail, The World of Interiors and Boxing Monthly. And I’d only gone into the shop for some stamps. I consume more paper, pound for pound, than any other product, food included. I am a paper omnivore. I devour it: any kind, from anywhere. (Or almost anywhere: in London recently I wandered absentmindedly into Smythson, the high-class stationers on Bond Street, one of those shops where the staff are even better-looking than the customers, who are anyway better-looking than anyone you’ve ever met, and where there are security guards on the door, and where a nice brown leather stationery bureau will set you back £1,500, and where the notebooks can be gold-embossed with lettering of your choice, and where, realistically, I couldn’t even afford a pack of cedar pencils.)

      And of course, when I scribble and print on my piles and piles of virgin white paper with my Faber-Castell pencils and my decidedly non-state-of-the-art Hewlett Packard scanner-copier-printer, what I’m really doing is taking a big double-headed felling axe and laying it unto the root. Now I am become Death, the destroyer of … woods. If a ream of paper is roughly equivalent to 5 per cent of a tree – though such figures are notoriously difficult to calculate and verify – then at approximately twenty reams’ worth of notes, or eight thousand sheets, the book you are currently holding in your hands is the product of at least one entire tree, though that’s not including all the paper books that were read and consumed in its production, nor the paper used for its own printing and publication: the gross product cost far exceeds the one tree, and is probably at least a small copse. The world’s great forests are not in Canada, Russia or the Amazon basin: they are in bookshops, bookshelves and Amazon warehouses all over the world.

      As soon as one begins to investigate and explore how and why we have made trees into paper one finds oneself in deeply troubling Oedipus territory – ignorant, blind, doomed as a despoiler – or perhaps more like Dante at the beginning of the Inferno, ‘Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/che la diritta via era smarrita’ (‘In the middle of the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark forest,/where the straight way was lost’). The poet Ciaran Carson translates Dante’s famous ‘selva oscura’ as ‘gloomy wood’: in tracing the history of modern paper manufacturing, the gloom at times seems overwhelming and all-encompassing, like the sudden approach of night, or like Malcolm’s army advancing towards Dunsinane at the end of Macbeth, creeping up unsuspected, camouflaged by boughs cut from the Great Birnam wood (a scene brilliantly, darkly depicted in Kurosawa’s 1957 film adaptation of the play, Throne of Blood: see YouTube). Light turns first to shadow and then to inescapable dark.

      During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, paper manufacturers began to search for new papermaking materials. There were simply not enough rags to go around: in 1800, Britain imported £200,000 worth of foreign rags for papermaking, and prices were rocketing. In the words of Dard Hunter, author of the unsurpassable Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (1943), what was required was ‘a vegetable fibre in compact form, easily gathered and handled and furnishing the highest average yield per acre of growth’. Wood was the obvious answer, and a man named Matthias Koops – mapmaker, bankrupt and inventor – came up with a quick solution. In 1800

      An example from G. F. Smith & Sons Ltd, paper and envelope makers, of the fibre content of their business envelopes (courtesy G. F. Smith & Sons Ltd)

      Koops published the magnificently titled Historical Account of the Substances Which have been Used to Convey Ideas from the Earliest Date to the Invention of Paper, in which he claimed that some of the pages of the book were of ‘Paper made from wood alone, the product of this country, without any intermixture of rags, waste paper, bark, straw or any other vegetable substance, from which paper might be, or has hitherto been manufactured; and of this the most ample testimony can be given’.

      Testimony was indeed forthcoming, for during 1800 and 1801 Koops was granted a number of patents for paper manufacturing, including one ‘for manufacturing paper from straw, hay, thistles, waste and refuse of hemp and flax, and different kinds of wood and bark’. Attracting investors to his alternative paper-manufacturing project, Koops built a vast paper mill in London, at Westminster – the grim sight of which the William Blake scholar Keri Davies believes may have influenced Blake’s apocalyptic vision of industrialisation in his prophetic book, The Four Zoas – but within a year Koops’s creditors had closed in on him again, and by 1804 the mill had been sold off, and it was left to others to profit from paper made from wood. These others included Friedrich Gottlob Keller, the German weaver who was granted the patent for a wood-grinding machine in 1840, a machine which was then developed by Heinrich Voelter and imported to America by Albrecht Pagenstecher, founder of the first ground-wood pulp mill in the United States. Chemical wood-pulping processes, which stew wood rather than grind it – using either alkali, in the soda process, or acid, in the sulphite process – were developed during the same period, and by the mid-nineteenth century the West’s potential paper crisis had been averted: raw-material costs had fallen, production had increased, demand worldwide exploded. The Age of Paper had truly begun. Wood had saved paper.

      And paper, in turn, has destroyed wood. Today, almost half of all industrially felled wood is pulped for paper, and according to green campaigners our uncontrollable appetite for the white stuff has become a threat to the entire blue planet. In medieval Britain special courts and inquisitions were held to hear the ‘pleas of the forest’, with tenants and foresters being summoned for breaches of the forest laws, including damage to timber and the poaching of venison. In a contemporary reversal of these forest eyres, activists and campaigners now call upon multinational paper companies to account for their forest-management crimes.

      One of the angriest and most eloquent among the modern-day forest pleaders is the writer and activist Mandy Haggith, who argues that ‘We need to unlearn our perception of a blank page as clean, safe and natural and see it for what it really is: chemically bleached tree-mash.’ According to Haggith and many others – groups such as ForestEthics, the Dogwood Alliance and the Natural Resources Defense Council – modern papermaking has had devastating human and environmental consequences: in short and in summary, as well as causing soil erosion, flooding, and the widespread extinction of habitats and species, it has also caused poverty, social conflict, and is leading us on a long and inexorable paper trail to world apocalypse, via self-destruction. The few giant global companies that dominate the paper industry – International Paper, Georgia-Pacific, Weyerhaeuser, Kimberly-Clark – are accused of razing ancient forests, replacing them with monoculture plantations that are dependent upon chemical-based fertilisers, and polluting rivers and lakes with their industrial by-products.

      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