[theBuckwheat]

A beetle infestation is like a fatal disease. Research is a important long-cycle activity, but with no clear date for success. When faced with an infestation, a chain saw trumps research any day for elimination of the pest, that is if the infestation is small enough.

I say this knowing that I don’t know much at all about this particular outbreak. Even so, we have past history and past behavior of the anti-logging crowd to recall, and I recall that after Mt. St. Helen's destroyed so many trees, that logging was not permitted. Neither was it after a moth infestation in the East some years ago. Let the trees rot, the “sustainable practices” crowd yelled.

[Clinging Bitterly]

This particular outbreak has been going on for near 25 years. Throughout this time, professional foresters have suggested harvesting the dead and dying trees in the infested areas to stem the tide.

I'm not a forester or a biologist but it seems to me the way to get rid of pests is to either kill them or starve them out. The simple truth is, some species need to be extinct (note to pres. Bush - veto funding of the US Senate - or at least their cafeterias).

For reasons unknown, environmentalists prefer to see large tracts of forest laid to waste, to release their lifetime of CO2 absorption back into the atmosphere through natural decay or by fire rather than maintain forest health where living trees would do exactly the opposite.

I have traveled the infested areas of central and eastern Oregon, and they are not small acreages of dead trees here and there, but rather tracts of hundreds of square miles.

The tonnage of CO2 being released by this volume of decaying and burning biomass has to be enormous.