Just to clarify, Doug, I'm not saying that you yourself are guilty of all the distortions I listed, just that that's what I keep hearing on talk radio and, for the most part, on all the major broadcast and cable media. Talk radio, in particular, is filled right now with scathing accusations that the "environmental extremists like the Sierra Club" want to keep people totally out of wilderness areas and don't want to allow any logging, and [to quote one young woman panelist I heard on Fox recently] "would rather see the entire forest burn to the ground than allow a single tree to be logged."

Solutions? No perfect answer. But, for starters, how about not allowing home building in some areas unless the owners agree in writing not to ask for public firefighters to try to save their buildings from forest fires? How about setting up some sort of oversight for "salvage logging" and "thinning" operations to make sure that large trees that are healthy or likely to survive a fire are not "salvaged" or "thinned?" [Yeah, it's more bureaucracy, but the alternative is to let the fox guard the hen house.]

Genie §:- )