Trees and woodchippers

I was watching a show called "Extreme Loggers". Those guys have a saw at the end of a big machine on tracks. It takes about a second to cut down a tree. (Chainsaws are way too slow.) Another big machine grabs the logs and hauls them to a wood chipper a few hundred yards away. There another big machine feeds the logs into the wood chipper that dumps into a semi truck to be hauled to the paper mill.

A tree can become a pile of chips in a truck in about 15 minutes easy. They do hundreds of trees a day in a small operation.

It seems odd to me that that's the best use of a forest we can come up with. It also seems odd we cant find another way to make paper. Odder still is that we still need all that paper in our digital society. Weren't we going "paperless" 20 years ago? Did that concept end up in a scrap heap along with the idea of changing over to the metric system?

Bottom Line - I guess its like watching sausage being made, if you did you wouldn't eat sausage. Same with pulp logging. Watching these guys ruin a few acres of forest in a day makes me a little queasy.

Lumber seems different, except when we ship it to Asia. Something about our forests going to Chinese housing so they can have a place to live while they dominate global manufacturing.