The story of a newspaper.

• Author: Durning, Alan Thein
• Position: Newspaper recycling

The first four paragraphs are pulp fiction. The rest is fact.

The Lead Story

As she stepped out the door on her way to work at the Pacific Rim Recycling Campaign, Hiroko Seko picked up her newspaper from the doorstep and noticed the lead story--that Disney had announced it would go ahead with the building of its huge "Disney's Wilderness" theme park at the foot of Mt. Rainier "on schedule," regardless whether or not the necessary road improvements were made in time. Disney was pulling another one of its end runs, she thought--sending a message to people who objected to the project that if they were really worried about the congestion caused by tourists flooding into the region's already-overburdened roads, all they had to do was get cracking with the needed new highway construction--the cost of which Disney had already offered to help defray.

"This is outrageous!" she exploded. "They're trying to give the impression that the question of whether the project will be approved isn't even an issue--that the only question is when! And, that the only problem to be solved is traffic! What about all the other costs?"

Once again, as often happened when she read the newspaper, she found herself wondering why it wa the even the activists didn't seem to be much aware of the hidden costs--they saw the traffic, but not the delayed medical costs of air pollution-caused emphysema and heart disease; they saw the destruction of forests and rivers, but not the huge increases in per capita energy consumption and greenhouse ga emissions that resulted from letting commercial development sprawl farther and farther into the countryside.

"Idiots!" she muttered, stabbing the headline with her finger, and reminding herself to write a letter to the editor. Noticing the black smudge of ink on her fingertip, she swore and threw the paper away. Then, sheepishly, she retrieved it and took it with her to the office, where she dropped it in the recycling bin.

The Story Behind the News

Like most people who pick up a newspaper and react emotionally to what they see, Seko was of course responding to the content of the story, not to the object in her hand. Only for a brief moment, when she disposed of it, did she perceive it as a physical object. And even that awareness had only entered her consciousness a few years before, though she'd been reading newspapers daily for the past 20 years.

Over those 20 years, her personal consumption of newspapers--counting the big Sunday...