I had to share this.
An old friend, working for the DEC in the Adirondack Park, sent me an email with this closing:
Consider the high unemployment rate of our loggers and those in the wood pulp industry before deciding NOT to print this e-mail.
20 copies of your post have been made for distribution to others.
When asked "paper or plastic" at the grocery store, I always tell them paper. I tell them by using paper, I am using a renewable green resource that provides many local jobs. Problem is, in reality, it is providing jobs in other countries, since we import most of our timber 🙁
Today a gal brought in a cloth bag for her groceries. She discovered that instead of getting a discount, the grocery store was donating $.05 from every cloth bag used, to a non-profit group that protects open spaces. The grocery store checker did not know what group they were giving it to. Over the last 20 years, our County economy has been devastated by environmental groups....from timber to farming. Really ironic that by using cloth bags, locals are funding the groups that are fighting to take away their right to farm and harvest timber on private land. I guess we just need to get used to the idea that we are not to utilize ANY natural resources (even responsibly) and should rely on third world countries depleting the worlds resources first.
Boggles my mind. The most potentially abundant resource we have is grown with FREE sun and rain. Why can we not figure out a way to utilize the resource in a manner that provides a net benefit to the environment? Talk about job creation! JRL
especially in light of the recent fires, which would be diminished if proper thinning of that resource had been allowed.
I know! You can start a new slogan “Save a Logger’s job; destroy a forest!” 😉
You snowcapped Yankees crack me up!
You can apply that mindset to any of our natural resources.
Reality is everything we have comes from the earth. We have to find a way to responsibly use these resources. Almost all of them are non-renewable. Timber is not. It is created with FREE sun and rain. Supervising yearly multi-million dollar fire camps is not what the BLM and Forest Service are supposed to be doing. What we are left with is millions of acres of brush fields, not forest.
Could that brush now create jobs in bio mass projects and tree planting?
There are ways to responsibly harvest timber from a forest. BLM and the Forest Service is just failing at their job.
If I lived in Texas, I'd be all about saving trees as well.
If you read my last statements, I do not think I was promoting destruction of the forest. That is the heart of the problem.
