to kill a cttonwood

Well put. It seems like a complicated issue until you reduce it to a bumper sticker in black and white. Those bleeding heart conservationists should all be shipped off to Liberia or to big tree-hugging concentration camps. Giant logging and mining corporations are perfectly capable of maintaining the environment just fine. Look at West Virginia .

All the best, Stan

P.S. You ARE a corporate executive making a 7 figure salary minimum aren't you? Hard to see how anyone else could resent the attempted protection of public lands---abuses, mistakes, excesses, misunderstandings, and plain stupidity notwithstanding. Those things come with being human.

You're a good sport. I've got no reason to give you a hard time, and I owe you an apology for doing so.

One bad tree in a woods wouldn't be terrible to remove; anyone who says it would be is missing the point. But lots of people miss the point about all kinds of things because they choose never to think for themselves if they don't have to. My issue here isn't conservationism---it's good faith. We could solve most of the problems in the world if we could talk to one another in good faith. If we're a mile apart on some issue, the first thing we have to do is find out why we're so far apart; after all, we're human beings living on the same planet. From that basic position we ought to be able to come to an understanding about anything, even things we don't agree about.

It isn't good faith to say that what the members of any serious movement want is what their most misguided, simple-minded, lunatic fringe members say they want. Every organization from your neighborhood association or your local grange all the way up to the major political parties has members who are an embarrassment to it. It's the opposite of helpful to assign the lunatic fringe point of view to the whole organization.

If the Sierra Club is trying to get the government to require big timber companies to restore the land somewhat after they have taken all the trees off it, or make them build or pay for their own roads instead of having the U.S. Forest Service be their free construction company, then it's not helpful for someone to say that therefore the Sierra Club doesn't want anybody to be able to cut a tree anywhere, ever. And if some local official says you can't cut a tree on your own property without filing a 14 page environmental impact statement and getting a ruling from the Supreme Court first, it's probably because that person is a small-minded petty bureaucrat with an ounce of authority and a ton of self-importance. I haven't noticed a shortage of those lately.

I'll get back to you on the weed thing---I'm still waiting for Al Gore to return my call.

All the best, Stan

--->Paul

When we are cleaning up brush, we cut off the hazelbrush trees and paint straight roundup on the stump right after the chainsaw, (You can't wait and let the veins of the stump seal off). We have never had a hazelbrush re-grow using this method.