The Internet is having a direct, highly beneficial impact on the environment. It is, in turn having an impact on the resource driven economy of British Columbia. Here’s a short story that paints a two-toned picture of how online news and information resources are impacting on the ecological balance of a resource-extraction economy.

I live on the south end of a large island off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. Much of the west side of the island is a temperate rainforest home to some of the largest and oldest trees on the planet. Entering the great forests of Vancouver Island is like stepping into another world, one of indescribably beauty and wild bio-diversity.

There are shades of green that only can only be seen in the Walbran Valley and species of flora and fauna that are only found in Clayoquot Sound.

While the people living on this island have a palatable spiritual connection to the rainforest, we also have a strong economic dependency on it. The primary resource extracted from the forest is wood. Wood comes from trees and the best wood in the world tends to come from this island simply because we happen to live amongst the largest and oldest trees on Earth.

We have a lot of wood. So much that, over the years we have learned to be terribly wasteful with it. Often, the wood is extracted wholesale in huge clumps known as clearcuts. Clearcuts happen when a crew works its way deep into a forest (generally half-way up the side of a mountain) and strips everything to the ground leaving a barren expanse of loose dirt, rock, and dead but damaged trees and slash, burnt to simulate a forest fire.

Like the Great Wall of China, BC clearcuts are visible marks on the Earth’s surface that can be seen from orbital space. The scale of industrial logging in BC is enormous. The sector generates somewhere between $9 – 10 billion annually and produces British Columbia’s number one export.

Clearcut logging is big problem for most environmentalists and also for many loggers. Though it is far safer than selective logging, clearcutting strips the land of all living things, destroying unique ecosystems that have evolved untouched for thousands of years. The damage is done in areas rarely visited by humans but considered sacred by urban environmentalists and unceded territory by First Nations peoples. Much of the land in BC is not covered by treaties. This little known fact of life in BC presents legal and ethical questions that ultimately serve to limit investment and weaken Canada’s moral standing on environmental and human rights issues.

To others, clearcut logging is an economic necessity. Hundreds of communities supporting hundreds of thousands of people exist because of the logging industry. A huge portion of the provincial tax base comes from logging. In Canada that tax-base allows for heavily subsidized health care, education and social services. In short, for British Columbians, logging is the primary industry supporting what most Canadians consider a more equitable way to structure society.

Obviously there are extraordinary tensions between environmentalists and loggers in this province. So what does this have to do with technology or the Internet? Lots.

One of the primary uses of BC old-growth forest is found by your telephone and on your doorstep. Millions of metric tonnes of newsprint are extracted from the great forests annually. Thousand year old trees are used to make telephone directories, the Yellow Pages and newspapers.

That great big thick weekend edition one relaxes over on Sunday mornings used to be a tree. That tree likely came from my neck of the woods, exported from British Columbia. Once part of a great forest ecosystem, that tree is now used to hawk fast-food, consumer goods and infotainment. Displaced squirrels, bears, cougars and thousands of other life forms couldn’t possibly understand, in part because, like that part of the forest, they no longer exist. Nevertheless, North America’s addiction to pizza, news, horoscopes and crossword puzzles helps fund medical, educational and social services in the province I call home.

That economic balance borne on an ecological nightmare is rapidly changing. The insatiable demand for newsprint is slowly but perceptively shrinking. More people are turning to the Internet for news and information and that smart consumer habit is having a direct effect on the logging industry in British Columbia. As the market for its product tightens, the pace of logging slows.

Case in point, a story appeared in the CanWest wire service yesterday stating the publisher of the telephone directories in four major Canadian cities have decided to issue new phone books every two years instead of annually. People living in Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City and Ottawa (approximately, 10,665,800 people) will have to apply to the Yellow Pages Income Fund, the company that publishes the telephone directories, if they want to receive new directories each year.

"People are using other means to find residential information," said Annie Marsolais, a spokeswoman for the Yellow Pages Income Fund. "The number of unique visitors to our online Canada411.ca website has increased by 100 per cent over the past three years."

A similar phenomenon is happening in the traditional print media where more money and resources are being focused towards the Internet than ever before. According to a December 2006 report on the Voice of America website, newspaper circulation in the United States is declining by about 2% each year. A similar report in the Washington Post suggests the decline is closer to 3% annually.

"We know that as circulation figures decline, as fewer and fewer people are reading newspapers in the United States and even watching or listening to mainstream television and radio, news organizations are trying to think where is the audience going. A lot of the audience, certainly the younger audience, is going to the internet." – Jeffrey Dvorkin, Committee of Concerned Journalists

In March 2002, the thick Sunday print edition of the New York Times saw an average of 1,753,059 newspapers circulated. Four years later, in September 2006, average circulation had dropped to 1,629,697. (source: NYTCO.COM – Investors Circulation Data)

According to the October 31 article in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times lost 8% of its daily circulation between March and November 2006. The Miami Herald saw an even larger decline with a 9% drop in average circulation in 2006. Other US national newspapers saw marginally better results. The Baltimore Sun lost 4.4%, the Washington Post lost 3.3% and the NYTimes was down 3.5%. Newsday lost a whopping 9% of circulation in 2006 and USAToday lost only 1.3%. Overall the number of newspapers being purchased by consumers is declining.

That means the number of rolls of newsprint required to publish daily newspapers and annual telephone books is declining, which in turn should save a bunch of trees in the ancient rainforests a few miles north of my sleepy island hometown. This is one of the primary reasons I became an Internet promoter almost fifteen years ago.

That ecological blessing brings a number of economic issues. Remember that nifty package deal of highly subsidized health care, education and social services Canadians are supposed to enjoy with their over-taxed but pleasantly regulated society? Those services are directly supported by resource-dollars and as demand for the #1 export resource decreases, funding for some of those services might as well. In 1985, logging accounted for over 60% of BC’s exports. In 2005 forest product exports only accounted for about 39% of provincial exports. (source: BC Government Stats)

Fortunately, the high-tech sector in urban areas like Vancouver, Victoria, Nanaimo, the Okanagan Valley and Prince George is booming with firms as large as EA Games, and ABEbooks.com calling BC home. In 2004, tech brought over $8.3 billion into BC’s economy, employing approximately 64,700 workers. By contrast, the logging and milling industries supported about 56,700 workers in total.

There is no question that the environment is by far the most important issue we face as a species. There is also no question that it is up to our generation(s) to make a positive difference in any way we possibly can. Though the economic and social hurdles of transferring from a resource based to a knowledge based economy are substantial, the long-term benefits are manifest. Anyone working to bring information to anyone via cable and electrons as opposed to using trucks and trees is clearly making a difference. The remaining squirrels, bears, cougars and whatnot would send their appreciation, as will future generations, but as of yet, they don’t know how to type.

Discuss this article in the Small Busines Ideas forum.