Free Republic

and now for something completely different to help you forget that this is an election year. (and from all the ayers threads). Raw video,Octobe21/08:Tasmania,Australia, TENSIONS over the logging of old-growth forests in Tasmania have boiled over into a violent attack by timber workers, caught on video yesterday. The timber workers are seen attacking a protest car with a sledgehammer and kicking in its windows as they demand that the occupants get out. With increasing fury, more workers join in the attack, surrounding More.. the car, which was deliberately disabled on a logging road, and leaving it trashed. A 22-year-old man...

Pine beetle kill trees have new purpose. Playing with Lincoln Logs as a child meant getting to be an architect constructing dream homes. Now, in Summit County, that toy is the inspiration for making those homes a reality while putting the lodgepole pine beetle kill trees to use. Using a log lathe machine, the bark is removed (which kills the pine beetle), smoothed and a notch is put in it similar to they way Lincoln Logs look so the logs will seamlessly fit together. And as this business has come together, it has gained state attention. Recently, a representative from...

Local foresters predict that up to 90 percent of lodgepole pines will die in some areas near West Vail. Local firefighters say that creates a veritable tenderbox that could easily ignite and spread. Sackbauer was pleased to see lots of work being done near his home this summer to reduce the risk of fire spreading, either from the forest into the neighborhood, or vice versa. workers created a 200- to 300-foot barrier of “defensible space,” a clear-cut area that aims to help stop the spread of fire. The town also hired a six-man “hand crew” to cut trees on town-owned...

New mill to turn dead trees into pellet fuel. Colorado's first wood-pellet mill owes its birth to pine beetles that are killing millions of trees near the town of Kremmling and across northwest Colorado. The diseased trees will be the new Kremmling mill's chief input - a new twist for the pellet-fuel industry. The 18,000-square-foot plant is billed as the largest west of the Mississippi. It's slated in February to start grinding trees into environmentally friendly pellets for wood-pellet stoves and industrial and commercial pellet boilers. Many of the trees are too skinny or too cracked and old to be...

About 20 piles of downed pine and aspen trees will be burned Wednesday and Thursday ... The trees were cut down this fall by crews building a buffer between the forest and neighborhoods to prevent the spread of wildfires. Once more snow falls, some of the 250 piles of timber remaining on the upper bench of Donovan Park will be burned.

When the U.S. Forest Service received no bids on two small timber sales in Eagle County earlier this year, the agency's local rangers encountered what is becoming a problem throughout the intermountain West. The federal agency got a lesson in market economics and the three-way tug of war over lumber in national forests. There were no bidders for the timber "salvage" sales designed to remove trees killed by infesting pine beetles. The Forest Service also wants to sell the dead trees so they won't add extra fuel to wildfires. The glut of dead trees is occurring at a time when...

Gov. Bill Ritter said Wednesday that the pine beetle epidemic that has killed nearly half of the state’s lodgepole pine trees will have an “impact for generations to come” and will change the look of Colorado’s forests. After getting a look at stands of dead trees from the air, Ritter said the outbreak is part of a natural cycle that has been encouraged by the drought, milder winters and the fact there are so many clusters of the same type and age of tree that are attractive to the beetles. He said the epidemic can’t be stopped, only managed to...

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Hundreds of loggers and angry residents have surrounded eight Greenpeace members who tried to leave an Amazon town with a scorched tree trunk for an exhibit on global warming, the environmental group said Wednesday. The activists are holed up in the makeshift headquarters of the federal environmental agency in the town of Castelo dos Sonhos, Greenpeace campaigner Andre Muggiati said. "They are still surrounded and the situation is tense," he said by telephone. The region in the Amazon state of Para is part of the so-called "arc of destruction," the southern edge of the rain...

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK -- A history of fire suppression, an invasive fungal plague, and rampant insect infestation fueled by global warming add up to likely extinction for the whitebark pine and serious trouble for the grizzly bear and other species that depend on it, some scientists say. That sets the stage for problem No. 2: white pine blister rust, an exotic species native to Eurasia and inadvertently introduced to western North America in 1910 near Vancouver, British Columbia... As the fungal disease spreads south and east, it leaves behind “ghost” forests, Tomback said -- stands of dead whitebark pine and...

The Pope took a couple of days off to visit the mountains of Alaska for some sight-seeing. He was cruising along the campground in the Pope mobile when there was a frantic commotion just at the edge of the woods. A helpless Democrat, wearing sandals, shorts, a "Save the Whales" hat, and a "Bush Lied - People Died" T-shirt, was screaming while struggling frantically, thrashing around trying to free himself from the grasp of a 10 foot grizzly. As the Pope watched, horrified, a group of Republican loggers came racing up. One quickly fired a .44 magnum into the bear's...

Canadians are becoming even more negative about Americans, viewing them as "rude, greedy and violent," suggests a survey released yesterday. And while most Canadians agreed Americans are inventive and hardworking, less than half called them honest, said the Pew Research Center poll, which charted some minor improvements in a major global image problem that spiked after President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003. But the survey, conducted among nearly 17,000 people this spring in the U.S. and 15 other countries, suggested America remains "broadly disliked" in 10 of them and regard for Americans is going down, Pew director...