(editor'snote)

While driving through Mill City, Oregon, 15 years ago, at the height of the timber wars, I saw a bumper sticker on a pickup truck: NO TOILET PAPER! WIPE YOUR ASS WITH A SPOTTED OWL! A vulgar sentiment, for sure, but one that contains a grain of truth, as this American art form on the rear end of vehicles usually does. Paper, like all resources, has to come from somewhere. As a local logger, Tom Hirons, told me at the time, “Pigs don't lay bacon and milk doesn't come from cartons. If you want to build a hot tub in California, you have to drop a tree.”

Such trade-offs hit us at Audubon with the force of a two-by-four as we prepared “The Final Frontier,” our feature on Canada's threatened boreal forest, which is, as writer Jeff Hull describes it, “the vast 1.4 billion-acre shawl of black spruce, aspen, paper birch, and larch that drapes from Labrador to the Yukon. Globally, 6.5 million square miles of boreal forest wrap Siberia, Scandinavia, and northern Canada.” Canada's boreal, representing a quarter of these forests left in the world, is crucial to an estimated 3 billion migratory birds, and in breeding season it has the richest avian diversity in all of North America.

Although Canada has the most intact boreal forest, few forests anywhere remain safe. The Canadian boreal is now falling at the rate of five acres a minute. Writes Hull, “About half the paper used to print magazines, newsprint, and the 17 billion catalogues produced annually in the United States was once boreal bird habitat.”

I'm glad to report that we have a solid track record producing Audubon, and that none of the paper used to make it comes from Canada's boreal or old-growth forests. On average, 25 percent of our magazine is made up of post-consumer recycled fiber—including, possibly, fiber from some of those catalogues you've recycled. (A few years ago Folio, an industry trade publication, lauded us as a leader in the use of recycled paper.) In addition, more than 60 percent of the material used to make the ink on our pages comes from renewable plant resources, and our ink does not contain the heavy, toxic metals often used in printing.

The global paper market is a lot like the oil market, ebbing and flowing from various points. We were unaware, until researching this issue, that 18 percent of Audubon's paper fiber comes from Finland's boreal forest. It's not enough to note that Scandinavia has had a heavily managed industrial forest for a long time as well as an old-growth protection program shaped by the World Wildlife Fund—or that the timber industry there boasts of practices certified as ecologically sound. At Audubon we're hiring a paper consultant to work with us on further reducing our environmental footprint.

We'd like to ask you to do your part, not just by recycling but by trying to follow the suggestions at the end of our boreal forest story to cancel mail-order catalogues as much as you can and to think about the source of other paper in your home. You'll be helping the forests up north, and the birds living there and here.