From: nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu (Nathan Engle)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh
Subject: Response concerning reference to "Virgin Forest"
Date: 22 Dec 92 20:58:47 GMT
Organization: Psych Department, Indiana University


    I receive the following in email from a person who was having 
problems posting from his site. I ask that you please try to keep the 
attributions straight in follow-ups.
========================================================================
From: jason@primal.ucdavis.edu (Jason Christian)
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 92 11:39:13 -0800
To: nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu
Subject: "Virgin" forests--Please help

Nate,

Will you help me by posting this to alt.fan.rush-limbaugh?  I have
never been able to persuade my newsreader to accept my posts (newbie),
making me an involuntary lurker.  I'd like to "de-lurk" on this one.

When I read the article yesterday in this newsgroup that repeated the
old line about "if you've seen one tree you've seen them all," I was
immediately annoyed.  Of course, this is just the old schoolyard and
radio-talk-show habit of "baiting," a singularly tedious practice which
is the exclusive domain of neither right nor left.  So I spit out
_that_ morsel.  I got hooked on the next one.

The writer (same article) then compared the virgin forest to a spruce
tree farm.  Same thing, he said, or implied, unless I'm mistaken.
I have struggled with whether to call the writer an ignoramus or simply
ignorant.  My understanding of "ignoramus" is that it implies willful
stupidity, for which I have no evidence.  So I settle on "ignorant,"
which is no insult.  I identify only a lack of knowledge and experience
on the part of the writer.  We are all ignorant about a lot of things.
I only hope I have the wisdom not to post about the things about which
I am ignorant, lest people confuse me for an ignoramus.

I deny that anyone who has walked in both the old-growth forest (the
term "virgin" seems inappropriate for a place so fecund) and a tree
plantation could ever confuse them for the same place.  In the old
forest you see around you the fruit of a thousand years of Creation, of
the perfection created by the striving of trees for light and water, of
the struggles of animals large and small for food for winter, or to
avoid being food for winter.  When the sun shines, it filters through
the high canopy; the shadows cast by the majestic trunks are grander
than those of the great columns of Chartres.  When the wind blows, as
it does often over the crests of the Sierra or up the canyons of the
Pacific Coast, this forest speaks.  If you will come and listen, you
will hear the baritone voice of your God.  Stop in that sunbeam; fold
yourself in the warm embrace of your loving God.

I honor the tree farmer.  He creates a source for wood fiber, to
satisfy are demands for paper.  The redwood plantations of Humbolt
county, the Douglas fir of Oregon, the pine of Louisiana and the spruce
of Quebec:  all are grown purposefully, on farms, by hardworking men
and women, organized by enterprises that accept substantial financial
risk in a difficult industry.  Those plantations are a monument to
those people, and we should respect their efforts.  Let us not,
however, be so arrogant, or ignorant, to compare their works, our
works, the experiments of Man, to the masterwork of nature.  Do we
compare the wheat farm to the prairie?

I was born and raised in one of the Northern California mill towns.  I
still think that the slap of fir planks flying off the green chain on a
summer night, with the saws roaring in the background, is the most
peaceful sound in the world; it was the six-year-old's lullaby, it
lulled the eighteen-year-old, and I would sleep like a baby, many years
later, if I heard it tonight.  And it is a disappearing sound, whose
passing I regret.  The forests that fed our mill, and the mill in Weed,
far to the North, and in Auburn, to the South, the mills in Sloat,
Quincy, and Greenville, the forests that fed the mills of Duluth, and
of Sault Ste. Marie, and of Makinaw, and of Fort Smith in Arkansas; the
great forests of North America are almost all gone.  There remain the
legends, and the legends' footprints:  the Paul Bunyan Motel on
Michigan's Upper Peninsula.  There remain the fossils, the rusting,
abandoned mills of Yuba and Siskiyou counties.  And, most important to
this bleeding-heart, there remain the people, my old neighbors and
schoolmates, the disillusioned mill-workers whose parents and
grandparents left the logged-out Ozarks of the 30's for the old growth,
virgin (unraped?) forests of California, innocently mouthing the lie 
that their jobs were taken by long-haired dope-smoking secular-humanist
nature-worshippers (tm).  The trees are gone, mostly, that sustained my
town and hundreds like it, sawn into VA-financed tract-homes, then
shipped overseas to be sawn in Japan.  The trees are gone, and all that
is left are the hard-working, uneducated people who cut them down to
feed their children, and who are now left in the cold winter of
"structural adjustment," fed only by the bile of cynics who prefer the
blame game to the far more difficult task of supporting them, and their
children, in their efforts to build a new life outside the vanished
virgin-timber industry.

I invite you all, cynics who exploit the end of the North American
forest, to come and see the reality.  If you think a spruce plantation
is the same thing as the disappeared hemlock forest of the Appalachian,
if you think that the productive rows of Georgia-Pacific's redwood
farms are the same as the groves of Sequoia Sempervirens, if you think
that Weyerhauser's Doug. Fir differs little from God's Own Work,  then
please, come and investigate for yourself.  Learn something.  But once
you have seen the glory of our old forests, whether it is the museum
piece of Muir Woods, an hour from downtown San Francisco, the splendor
of the protect Parklands, or the threatened last stands in the National
Forests of Northern California, Oregon,and Washington, once you have
been reborn in those little pockets of Eden, please go to Fortuna, or
Quincy, or Klamath Falls, and think about the people whose lives turn
around those sacred trees.  Place their cares in your heart, and think
about their future.  Then, all of you, tree-huggers and -sawyers, do as
I did once.  Steer your path through Michigan's depressed Upper
Peninsula (Tree Farms abound!), or through Missouri's Mark Twain
National Forest, and ask if that is the future you want for those
people.

Once you have taken the acid test, looked hard at the truth, felt the
problems, then please, try on the platitudes again.  If they fit, wear
them with pride.  If not, then please understand that in wearing those
garish rags, you label yourself buffoon, cynic, ignoramus.  Maybe you
can get a job as a talk show host.  The dough's not bad, if you can
stomach the smell.

-- Jason Christian
   jason@primal.ucdavis.edu

--
Nathan Engle                        Software Juggler
Psychology Department               Indiana University
nate@psygate.psych.indiana.edu      nengle@copper.ucs.indiana.edu
Newsgroups: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh