Anyone who has spent time in the corporate, academic or government workforce has surely seen it at the bottom of someone’s email signature.
Underneath the sender’s name, title, company, phone number, email address, fax number, mailing address, astrological sign, favorite obscure crayon color, quote from a writer or poet the sender never actually read and wouldn’t understand anyway and finally some random squiggly wingding that takes up space is a message to really hammer home:
“Please consider the environment before printing this email.”
It’s usually written in green or accompanied by a little picture of a tree, because the sender is, like, totally eco-friendly. Maybe it’s just me, but if I cared about the environment, I would go out and do something about it instead of change my email signature and call it my good deed for the day.
Sure, over the course of a year your email signature might save a couple pieces of paper. But I could probably replenish that paper ten-fold by eating an apple and taking a dump in the woods next to my house. An undigested seed will germinate and, years thereafter, local schoolchildren will pluck delicious apples from my feces tree. At any time I could evict the resident squirrels and turn the tree into a few reams of paper.
Your fancy message, on the other hand, incrementally increases the size of your emails, which increases the amount of energy needed to send them, which increases the amount of fossil fuel burned at the local power plant. Send enough emails, and your “save-the-trees” signature actually increases the size of the hole in the ozone layer and contributes to global warming. I think I know who to blame for the record-setting heat wave this summer.
I’m joking, of course: I wouldn’t actually make the argument that your email signature is hurting the environment. Rather, your misguided faux-activism is hurting the environment.
Of all the causes in the world to pretend to care about, in a world of global warming, hydraulic fracturing, nuclear meltdown, overharvesting, genetically modified organisms and cute innocent baby animals covered in crude oil, your pièce de résistance is trees.
The same trees that people have been burning ever since we figured out fire. The same trees that are so scarce we only use them to make homes, telephone poles, furniture, food additives (cellulose is wood pulp, read those ingredient labels, folks) baseball bats and basically everything you can think of. The same trees that we joke about something growing on, because then it would be plentiful.
People with eco-signatures frustrate me because they adulterate a legitimate concern — the environment — and contort it into a fad, something to be emulated for the sake of fitting in. But unlike planking and gladiator sandals and every other disposable trend, environmentalism is actually rooted in something important: the belief that raping our planet of its natural resources isn’t sustainable. Instead of a throwaway line at the bottom of an email signature, let’s elevate environmentalism to something more — something that transcends chic, something worth fighting for.
It seems fitting that this column is destined to be printed on the thin, cheap paper used by The Diamondback because it only needs to last a few days. Less important than the paper itself is the message it carries. As far as environmentalism is concerned, I don’t care if you toss the newspaper into a recycling bin: I just hope you get the message.
Christopher Haxel is a senior English major. He can be reached at haxel at umdbk dot com.
