When you think of anti-environmentalism, what comes to mind? Plastic straws, gas stoves, 500 cigarettes perhaps? These all contribute to the destruction of the environment, but what if I were to say that there is a company that is hell-bent on slaughtering Mother Nature’s favorite child?
The rainforest needs no introduction. For those puzzled and/or confused, allow me to provide a brief introduction to the rainforest. Legend has it that it was first founded by John Forest in the mid 1800s after he defeated Supreme Leader of the property Tarzan the Ape-Man in a bareknuckle brawl. Under Forest’s reign, the civilization was able to prosper with unique plant and animal life found nowhere else on the planet. However, Forest and his people were set on keeping their perfect utopia private from invaders.
David Livingstone was one of these. In the search of free healthcare, he managed to stumble across Forest’s perfect world. He was immediately captured by Forest and held as a hostage for nearly six years while being forced to live off of SPAM and strawberry milk.
Henry Morton Stanley was sent to track down Livingstone following his disappearance, because Livingstone was their town doctor, aiding them in all sorts of medical escapades such as papercuts and bee stings. After two years of searching, Stanley successfully located Forest’s civilization, fired ten shots into leader John Forest and followed with the line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” to show how much of a badass he really was.
Stanley was crowned as the local hero and was given the permanent title of Duke Nukem, because the name “Henry Morton Stanley” sounded too lame to be a hero name. Meanwhile, the civilians of Forest’s former kingdom set out to rebuild it, bigger and better than ever before. In honor of their fearless leader, they finally created a name for their land, now known as “Reignforest” to signify Forest’s former reign. But because of the fact that silent letters are pointless and should not exist, the name was refined to become “Rainforest”, which is where it stands today.
One of the most valuable things to come out of this natural paradise is coffee. Harvested from the plant of the same name, it has been distributed throughout the world and is made into a drink with a stimulant called caffeine that makes people more productive.
Coffee plantations often require the clearing out of large spaces to properly maximize the amount of coffee being grown. Since coffee is found naturally in the rainforest, it only makes sense that the land would be cleared out there, leading to massive destruction of Forest’s utopia, otherwise known as deforestation.
This is where Lucius Lowe’s hardware store comes into play. While making people think that the company’s ideology is built on home improvement, there is a much darker interior.
Lowe’s has a paid subscription program for those who go to Lowe’s on a regular basis called Lowe’s Pros. With this system, those that are Lowe’s Pros members receive benefits, with one specific benefit being the distribution of free coffee in the mornings for those Lowe’s Pros members.
From an outsider perspective, this doesn’t seem like too much of an appetite for destruction. Many places serve coffee, so why should Lowe’s be treated any differently? This is exactly what Lowe’s wants you to think. By enticing their customers with free coffee, they are more likely to purchase other Lowe’s products. And with the smell of lumber in the air, the next product of deforestation is readily available to the consumer.
It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why Lowe’s smells like lumber. The general theory is that it smells like lumber because of the numerous types of lumber sold in the location, but this is a simple speculation and should not immediately be taken as fact. Assuming this is the case, it begs the question of “where does lumber come from?” with the answer being trees.
The next question is “Where does Lowe’s get their trees?” It’s possible that they harvest trees from North America, but with several unique woods only being found in the rainforest, the plot becomes perfectly clear. With all of the additional trees being deforested for coffee production, Lowe’s uses those trees for lumber sales while simultaneously using the free coffee to draw in more customers. Why would Lowe’s do this? To that, there is a simple answer: money.
There are two things that solve every problem: money and explosives. Since Lowe’s has yet to become a major military threat, it can easily be inferred that they have decided to use the former to their advantage. Every amazing tree that is hacked apart for coffee production is another dollar in someone else’s pocket that isn’t yours.
So what can be done about this? Unfortunately, not much. Everyone needs both coffee and money, so they can’t exactly just be taken away from people whose dependency on it is as strong as the 1776 Declaration of Dependence. But what can be changed is you.
You are what you can control. All it takes for a little bit of difference is for you to stop drinking coffee. That tiny bit of a difference is exactly what John Forest would have wanted for all of us.
