thanks for the comment, mg, about cows, sheep and goats taking care of the brush problem. This solution has been tried in a number of areas (mostly California I believe) where roadside foliage is an expensive and huge problem. Using goats to graze, instead of manpower and equipment to mow, is an ingenious and cost-effective, not to mention environmentally-friendly, solution. The goats get to eat, their wool is a precious commodity (especially if cashmere or alpaca goats are acquired for this purpose), the comunity loves the site of these animals doing their work, and the grass and brush is kept under control.

I also agree the logging industry and its workers could easily be retrained for forest management, in cases where there is valuable knowledge and experience to be shared. This is not always the case and unfortunately the ideological differences between environmentalists and loggers straddle a wide chasm. Maybe this will change. And corporate interests don;t care aymore about the working man than they do about the environment, even though their rhetoric speaks otherwise (remember the "family farm" campaigns of a few years ago? Amazing what a well-chosen public relations firm can do to make your motivation seem noble. How many family farms do we have left?). People who make a joke out of the plight of the snowy owl or the redwoods, who can't see why the preservation of species is more important than industry, any industry, are hard to convince otherwise.

And yes, I am right about this.