AMONG THE most laughable hypocrites in history are newspaper people who pretend to be tree huggers.

The essence of the newspaper business, of course, is the cutting down of trees to make newsprint on which various pieces of information can be imprinted and then sold to consumers.

These days newspapering may not be the most successful of enterprises — unlike days gone by when owning a chain of big city papers could make you one of the richest people in the world. Nevertheless, printing news, features and advertising on dead trees is still a multi-billion dollar business that employs many thousands of people in this country.

One of them is the Executive Editor of the Monterey County Herald, who this week used the smoothed pulp of many trees to disseminate his thoughts.

“Sometimes OK to cut down trees,” was the headline on Royal Calkins’ opinion piece on Wednesday. Presumably, he believed the essay contained enough insightful analysis to make it worth reading, not to mention reproducing at least 25,000 times on paper.

In it, Calkins confessed that he agreed with the local citizens who signed petitions calling for a relocation of a new transit yard at the former Fort Ord because building it would involve clearing a lot of trees. But while he has “tree-hugger tendencies,” Calkins said he was bothered by the opponents’ notion that “trees should never, or almost never, be cut down for the sake of a construction project.”

It’s OK, he concluded, to love trees and “be quite fond of a piece of lumber.”

The fact that he makes his living off dead trees went unmentioned. So did the fact that he uses wood in other forms at least 100 times a day. And so does everyone else.

We think trees should be protected, too. Especially from being destroyed for the purpose of distributing such obvious drivel.

Speaking of which, Monterey County Weekly this week front-paged a series of stories that purport to show that the county’s poor are a “starving class,” and that “hunger games” mean that “those who pick our crops are often underfed at night” and even that “the people harvesting the food ... in the Salad Bowl of America ... do not have access to this food.”

Unfortunately for gullible reporters Sara Rubin and Sasha Abramsky, their stories don’t contain the slightest direct evidence that these phenomena actually exist. The only person they cite who claims to be “struggling” to feed her family, despite charity and government assistance programs, also had this to say: “We don’t eat out very much.”

Of course, many people are poor and need financial and other assistance. But the idea that people are hungry and even starving in Monterey County remains to be proved. Until it is, perhaps the trees being used to spread it should also be spared.