[theBuckwheat]

We are happy to appropriate a few hundred thousand of the people’s money to research a pest that is destroying millions of trees, research that might take years if not decades to mature into actually protecting the trees, but we cannot possibly allow private companies to spend their own capital to log even a fraction of those trees, even though we stand to reap millions in taxes from any profits.

If history is any guide, when we are faced with thousands of acres of these dead trees, we will not allow anyone to harvest them. Thus the crowd who lectures the rest of us about “sustainability” would rather see the forest rot than for us to harvest any of it.

[cripplecreek]

I suspect the logging companies would be willing to spend some money on research to protect the resource if there were a profit from it in the end.