Perhaps because lumber is the material of choice for building homes. Do YOU live in a wood-frame home, Daniel? Do you use paper for printing on, at work, and perhaps at home too? And what do YOU use for bath tissue? Are you a forest products consumer? If not, then your righteous wrath is noted. If so, your hypocrisy is noted.
Dwight, you obviously know a lot about the timber industry. Not. Lots of good "facts" above.
Most building lumber these days is southern yellow pine. How much of that do you think comes from the Pacific Northwest? Lumber guys like the tall old growth, there's not much of it left and it commands a high price for that reason. You can cut big clear beams from it, you can't do that with plantation-grown southern pine. It gets used for expensive large timber frame construction, and a lot of it gets exported. For the most part, it's not a renewable resource, if it were necessary for conventional homebuilding, houses here would start costing what they cost in Japan. Most construction lumber used here is from renewable sources.
As for paper, you think they use old growth timber for paper? That actually used to happen in the Tsongas National Forest on the Alaskan Coast, because of some really stupid old contract, but after a long, long battle, that got stopped. Anybody who'd use old growth timber for papermaking is nuts. Paper gets made from the cheapest, fastest growing wood you can get, poplar is big here in Wisconsin. The logs stacked up at the paper mills tend to be 6-12" in diameter. You think they haul those here from the Pacific NW?
The old growth timber is essentially gone already. There's a few percent of the original forest left. Most of what's left is in the hardest places to log, steep hillsides and such. Also happens to be where the standard industry clearcut practices are most damaging to the environment. Why the government needs to sell off the little remaining as quickly as possible at a loss, you'll have to ask Slade about that one. Or maybe you can appeal to a higher authority, as James Watt did.
It was nice that you didn't just call me a liar, though, which is what I was expecting. I was getting psyched for hopping over to thomas, to get chapter and verse of the law. Though reading it again would have been sickening enough, wouldn't be any worse than most of the "TRUTH" written around here. |
