Nature's Filaments Summary and Analysis

The chapter opens with a description of the industrial revolutions that made growing, harvesting and using cotton and wood for our clothes, papers and homes exponentially easier. Then, petrochemical industry came along with synthetic fibers that, while they relieved the burden on growing and harvesting natural fibers, they produce a great deal of pollution and use nonrenewable resources. Paper as an industry is also incredibly inefficient and expensive to our natural resources, and has produced an incredible amount of landfill waste before recycling became the norm. The other alternative is to replace paper storage and interchange of information with electronic storage and communication, so that in the same way that reducing energy use at the consumer end reduces the amount of energy a power plant has to produce by huge amounts, reducing the pull on paper on the consumer...