OT
Your opinion please. Another "Hate Crime"?:
December 2, 2000
Don't cry, butterfly: big trees make great decks
After vandals used a chain saw to leave a substantial slice along the base of Luna, a 1,000-year-old redwood tree in Humboldt County, tree hugger Paul Bassis told The Chronicle that the chain-saw job was "not an act of vandalism, it's a hate crime. It's a hate crime against nature." Cross your fingers that Dems won't work for yet another federal law to prosecute this new category of hate-crime victim -- politically correct plants.
Or conifers of a certain age.
Yet in a sense, Bassis is right. There must have been a lot of hate emanating from the hands that held that chain saw.
Controversy has surrounded the old tree since the campaign that turned the redwood into a four-letter word. For two years, environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill lived in the tree as she crusaded to keep Pacific Lumber Co. from harvesting it. Her effort paid off. Pacific Lumber agreed not to fell Luna, and Hill didn't face charges for trespassing on private property.
Rose Comstock, a timber specialist who grew up in Humboldt County, saw how the episode rubbed many locals the wrong way. "Trespassers, folks who chain themselves to gates, chain themselves to trees and prevent people from going to work in a legitimate area cause a great deal of anger and resentment," she observed. Especially
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