Liturgical revision kills trees. It should be an obvious point; the 1979 Book of Common Prayer is just over 1,000 pages long. How many trees might be needed for a new batch of Prayer Books, such as those that might contain the new liturgies now called for by Ruth Meyers? According to the Sierra Club, you can get between 10,000 and 20,000 pieces of letter-size paper from a tree. The website conservatree.org estimates a slightly smaller number, proposing that a single ream of paper (500 sheets) uses 6% of a tree (meaning that you get just over 8,000 sheets of paper from the average tree). If a piece of paper is folded in half (i.e. in quarto), all 4 sides can be printed on; if the 1979 BCPâ??s ~1,000 pages are divided by these 4 sides, approximately 250 pieces of paper are needed to print just one BCP. If a single tree of 8,000 sheets is divided by the 250 pieces of paper needed to print a Prayer Book, then one tree will yield 32 BCPs. If you get 10,000 sheets from a tree, it will produce 40 BCPs, and 20,000 sheets from a tree will produce 80 BCPs.
The most recent statistics for the Episcopal Church state that it has 7,044 parishes and just under 2 million active members. If each parish were to buy just 50 Prayer Books, we would need 352,200 Prayer Books â?? thus roughly one BCP for every 6.5 members. This is unrealistic; clearly we need more. Assuming that two people can share a Book of Common Prayer in each service, we will need about one million Prayer Books (recognizing that such sharing is rather optimistic). If a single tree can give us 40 BCPs, we will need to kill 25,000 trees for the one million Prayer Books that contain our liturgy. If we get fewer pieces of paper from a tree, we will need to kill more trees; if we can get more pages from a tree, then we will need to kill fewer trees. Perhaps we should chop down the largest trees we can find, so that we end up chopping down the smallest possible number?
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