In article KFRLe.5175$Al5.3208@trnddc04,
"B J Conner" wrote:

BTW when you were flying around looking at those nets did you notice the
clear cuts? The country south of Olympic National Park looks like some of
the photos of Brazil. All those bare areas on virtulaearth.com aren't potato
fields or cow pastures.

Yep, and spent quite a lot of time hiking, hunting, camping and fishing
near and in both clear cuts and selectively logged areas in the
Olympics, Cascades, Methow Valley area and over in Okanogan. Not sure
which method is worse (or better for that matter). I don't think that
you get a real perspective on the large forest areas East and West until
you get over it via a road or airplane. It's shocking how much logging
there is but even more shocking is how much logging there isn't. My
point I guess is that development and use of natural resources does not
have to be in opposition to protection of natural resources. Hyperbole
on any side of an issue usually leads to non-useful discourse. I think
in some cases our protection of resources is going to lead to some real
ugly situations. Look at the Blue Ridge parkway in VA. Miles and miles
of in many cases a single species of tree planted by the CCC in the late
twenties and thirties. A truly great effort but what happens when the
next Chestnut blight or Pine Bark beetle comes along? The Blue Ridge
will look much like it did in the 1920's without a tree is site. We
might be better off in carefully logging parts of it and replanting to
create a more diverse biology. There was a great article in last months
Outside I read on the way back from Bozeman about a green leaning
individual who bought some property and found that the forest on it was
a real mess and that he had to carefully log it in order to make it
healthy. Because it was so bad he had a whole lot of "useless" little
trees that, although old, were all less than a foot or so in diameter.
He did some thinking and with some help from gov't grants created a
company to cut and marketing the small, very densely ringed lumber for
high end dance floors and such. Used an expensive Swedish machine to do
so IIRC. A fine use of gov't seed money that may well pay off in getting
folks to pay attention to smarter logging in non-traditional spaces
There is actually reasonable amount of non-roadbuilding helo logging in
the Cascades for large, high dollar trees. Even though they were
supposed to let the schedules folks know when and where they were going
to be in operation, on low level training routes about once a year you'd
come over a ridge inverted at 200' and 500 knots to find a helo with a
log slung under it in front of you, usually you just passed under him
and hoped he didn't drop it.

None of this issue, or any other environmental issue is simple and none
will be solved with a sound bite. The depletion of resources is due to
many smaller issues over a long period of time. It will likely be a
serious of small, appropriate midcourse corrections over time that will
fix them and not some giant change. My earlier comment about the nets on
the Skagit was based not only on flying over them but also fishing the
Skagit with the nets in and the nets out and seeing the difference. Yes,
in most cases those nets are NA nets but they have the same obligation
under treaty and law to protect the resource.

Sorry for the length, off the soapbox.

Allen