Skip to footer

Earth Day: Five ways we affect the planet

4. Natural resource use: a tree a year

Rich Pedroncelli/AP/File
This file photo shows logs being loaded on a truck on the Stanislaus National Forest near Dorrington, Calif. The average American uses one large tree's worth of paper and wood products per year.

  • By Schuyler Velasco Correspondent

Among the country’s top natural resource industries are petroleum, coal, minerals, forestry, metals, fishing, hunting, and natural gas.

Natural gas: The US produces 20 percent of the world’s natural gas, the most of any country.  

Coal: In 2010, the US produced 984.6 billion tons of coal, second only to China. Wyoming produces the most coal of any state, 41 percent of the US total.

Forestry: The United States has 504 million acres of forest classified as “timberland” for growing commercial wood, and the average American uses the equivalent of one 100-foot tree in paper and wood products each year.

Mining jobs tend to be high-paying, but the resources aren't sustainable. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that at the current rate of industry growth, we will run out of coal in 168 years. Our oil reserves are unknown, but being a non-renewable resource, it will run out eventually, too.

4 of 5
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.