From his letter from the editor in the September 2024 issue of Reportagen. Translated from the German by Oscar Dorr.
Dear Readers,
“You’re killing trees!” runs an accusation often leveled against me. In times when digital reading is on the rise, a print magazine might be seen as both an anachronism and an ecological crime. For this reason, my invitation to visit Lessebo, in southern Sweden, came at just the right time. It is from there that the paper on which you are reading these lines comes: Lessebo 1.3, natural, 115 g/m2. The locality of the same name sits three hours from the Swedish–Danish border. On the way there: nothing but trees. Are these the same birches and pines that we cut down for Reportagen? You can read on with a good conscience. Sweden is more than ten times the size of Switzerland and about 70 percent forested. A tree may need seventy years until it can be harvested. These days, it takes perhaps twenty seconds for a tree to be felled with one of these modern machines, including sawing it into transportable pieces. In only half a day, a lumberjack can cut down enough trees for an entire print run of one of our issues. Thus, even if we sold one hundred times as many magazines and he were felling trees nonstop, he would still be unable to compete with the slow and steady growth of Sweden’s forests. We wish you good reading.
