Well said, Don F.! You, too, Bobert, Kendall, Art. And Don F. again!

Another aspect of the problem is that those who want to "harvest" the forests want these two things:

• trees that are less than 150 or 200 years old  shouldn't be considered "old growth" and thus shouldn't be protected.

• trees are considered of "harvest age" when they are about 60 years old; no timber companies that I know of have a 200-year "crop rotation" cycle, or anything close to it.

Folks who want to blame environmentalists for fires, loss of jobs, etc., like to say saving the spotted owl is not really what the environmentalists are after--that they have a hidden agenda.  Well, they're right--except for the "hidden" part.  Unfortunately, the endangered species act does not allow whole forest ecosystems to be classified as "endangered," and thus protected.  That is the real--and explicit--agenda.  And those ecosystems need protecting, in part, because of their importance in maintaining the quality of life that we humans desire.  Even if the spotted owl and the marbled murrelet (sp?) could live in Seattle and hatchery salmon could live in our dammed rivers, and even if we were not losing board-feet of "timber" every year, when complex forest ecosystems are replaced with near-monoculture tree farms, we're flirting with disaster.  We like to pull at the threads of the tapestry without knowing how they're connected.  How long can we pull before the whole thing comes unravelled?
 

Sonja