The Trees Look Green

If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason.
~Jack Handey

It is difficult to realize how great a part of all that is cheerful and delightful in the recollections of our own life is associated with trees.
~Wilson Flagg

Except during the nine months before he draws his first breath, no man manages his affairs as well as a tree does.
~George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists, 1903

It's funny how much trees are a part of us. For a number of summers during my undergraduate at the U of S, I'd go off to do some treeplanting in order to make enough money to pay for school during the next year. At first I was shocked at how much forest we (humanity) cut down. We'd take helicopters into the backcountry of Alberta and Saskatchewan where we'd be "exposed" to the truth of the bald mountains or the wide-open, created "prairie". It's funny how one can become physically nauseous by the sight of it all. In my first summer, we planted an area that I was fortunate enough to return to three years later. The forestry industry hypes our natural soft wood and hard wood resources as renewable, but understand that the chances of a one-hundred year old tree being renewed are slim to none. The trees we had planted were mostly dead due to the large number of insects that now feed off them. These insects have become immune to the large amount of pesticides used to "help" these saplings grow. Now the likelihood of one sapling making it to maturity is more like one-in-ten. How is that "renewable"? That is a question I would like to ask a company like Weyerhaeuser, one of the worst perpetrators of environmental degradation that the Canadian west has allowed to reap the rewards of its natural forest. Why not try hemp instead?

Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them. ~Bill Vaughn "The Portable Curmudgeon" compiled by Jon Winokur

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.
~Cree Indian Proverb

A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense.
~American Proverb

They kill good trees to put out bad newspapers.
~James G. Watt, quoted in Newsweek, 8 March 1982

Save a tree. Eat a beaver.
~Author Unknown