by Pat Tigges
The ‘save the trees’ crusade creates guilt in kids. They think there are only a few left! That’s an out-and-out lie, plus a tragic misuse of guilt. We have more forests than we did when the pilgrims landed. Annually timber growth in the U.S. exceeds harvest by 37%. We have grown more than we have cut every year for 44 years.
Growth is three times what it was in 1920 resulting in a 20% increase in wooded acres. One reason is that we have replaced the horse and mule with autos, trucks and tractors. Every mule required two or three acres of land to eat. Another reason, stated above, is that increased paper demand resulted in more trees.
About redwoods and old growth, I hear that the last 10 percent is about to be cut. The last 10 percent of what? National parks contain millions of acres, including 403,000 in Sequoia, 2.2 million in Yellowstone, nearly a million in Olympic 235,000 in Mount Rainier, and 109,000 in Redwood. Washington has 2.5 million acres of untouchable public park, forest, and wilderness. Oregon has 2 million. How much is enough.
How many times have you read the word ‘ecosystem’? If you’re in natural resource industries you must be as sick of it as I am. Our kids cut their teeth on it, you can’t pick up a paper, read a magazine, or talk to a researcher, scientist or university minion without the word being introduced into the conversion. Enough. We’re all being scammed. An ecosystem is smoke and mirrors.
As near as I can determine - and I read more than most - the concept of an ecosystem was created originally to estimate energy flows in systems. It was a model created by researchers and used the same way researchers model changes in the atmosphere to try and predict global warming.
But the models themselves don’t correspond to anything in the natural world. In the natural world they are undefinable. No one, not environmental scientist, not historians, not anyone that I know of, can tell you the limits of an ecosystem. They don’t have a natural world counterpart. They are an artificial concept.
Unfortunately the green groups have taken this artificial, lab-created, concept as their banner. “Everything is connected”, they cry, “therefore all plants, animals and activities are interrelated. Any change in one affects another. Therefore we must protect everything from ever changing.”
Stopping change is a meaningless and impossible goal. But the goal works. It rallies the troops. And, it has caused actual resource industries, people who should know better, to pickup their phoney crusade.
Pat Tigges Administrator of Eat First! A project of the Pacific Northwest Aerial Application Education Foundation. P.O. Box 415, Coulee City, WA 99115. Phone: 509-632-5256, Fax: 509-632-5100 Newsletter is $25.00 per year
Reprint permission given by AgAir Update, P.O. Box 850, Perry, GA 31069 - an international agricultural aviation publication.
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