So, leave aside the notion that male bears tend to eat their offspring. It’s a little too graphic for the anthropomorphists
But one of their new themes is Poppa Bear and Little Bear in a rowboat fishing. Little Bear gets impatient. Then has the bright idea to drop a piece of the Overpriced-and-not-any-better-than-any-other-brand of toilet paper into the water.Which is so absorbent that it dries up the whole lake. All the fish are gasping for water to breathe, flopping around in their death throes. Somehow, in the insane popularity contest that passes for “awww, wook at the cute animals” the fish aren’t given fake smiles, humanized eye placement and faces, and the other pond dwellers who are sometimes anthropomorphized, like the frogs, aren’t represented. BUT… That’s not the truly relevant part.
It’s part of the relevance though, that’s why I included it. The fact is, though, in our Throw-Away Society, where everything including Human Beings is disposable, paper products are among the worst offenders.
First they take out the native, healthy, sustained ecosystem forests and put in “better managed” forests where all the trees are planted at the same time, no underbrush to get in the way of the Organized, Efficient Harvesting of them when the Corporate Owners decide it’s their turn to die, and the Corporatists who will no doubt object to this analogy are going to say
“Why, oh why, can’t we get all “our” workers organized like that, where they’ll perform their jobs efficiently for our profit and then die off in an orderly manner, instead of being, you know, Human?”
Of course the planting of tree-farms where forests used to be not only allows for the Dehumanized Workers and their more-valuable-to-the-company machines to access the “product” for maintenance and harvest, it also hastens erosion and provides no nutrition for the animals, either the Cute and Fuzzy winners of the Insane Popularity Contest, like the deer and the bears and the rabbits (Did you know there’s actually been a recent extinction event, a species of RABBIT? It’s true… you might think to yourself “Self, how does a species that breeds like, well, Rabbits, go extinct?”) and the squirrels and chipmunks which are “good” animals, and the slugs, beetles, very large species of cockroach, vultures, rattlesnakes, worms, you know, the ones that are much harder to paint as Furry People, aren’t normally eaten directly by people and it takes more than a couple of very quick and short sentences using only one-and-two-syllable words, to describe how they fit into the “food chain” far less the enormously complex and beautifully orchestrated Ecosystem.
Then at the other end of the process (middle actually, the “profitable” output of it still has to be shipped, marketed and then “disposed of properly” whatever the hell THAT means) the process of shredding the once-living trees into pulp, instead of long fibers (remember, they’re not aiming for quality, they’re aiming for the Corporate Trifecta: Fast, Cheap and Disposable) then glued back together, pressed into paper and rolled out into sheets. All this uses a lot of water and releases a lot of chemicals that would tend to kill, say, FISH, and bears, and Humans, into the water flow. Which has already been altered by the way the Tree Farms and Logging Roads are organized.
Now, Children, wasn’t THAT a special story? Very “cute and fuzzy” yes?
The Corporatists probably won’t want you to hear that, not because it would give you nightmares of Bears and Children flopping around like fish with nothing to breathe and drowning in poison water. No, they don’t want you to hear that, kids, because then you wouldn’t be nearly as likely to buy their product.