Word: tree
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...month that "increased tax revenues" would be necessary to reduce the budget deficit, everyone in Washington has been running for cover. No wonder. Louisiana's legendary Russell Long once described raising taxes as a game of "don't tax me, don't tax thee, tax that fellow behind the tree...
Page counts himself an ally of nature, not an enemy. "An old-growth forest is unique," he says. "There's just something about a big tree that makes you feel kind of small." Like many of the other loggers, his relationship with the forest extends beyond the edge of his saw. "After working in the woods for 44 years, I guess wilderness means a place you can go where you know man hasn't trifled with it, where you can think it's the way Ma Nature wanted it to be." But Page looks beyond the clearing...
...thick bark, the thin film of living tissue and the growth rings spanning ages. With an excruciating groan, all 190 ft. of trunk and green spire crash to earth. When the cloud of detritus and needles settles, the ancient forest of the Pacific Northwest has retreated one more step. Tree by tree, acre by acre, it falls, and with it vanishes the habitat of innumerable creatures. None among these creatures is more vulnerable than the northern spotted owl, a bird so docile it will descend from the safety of its lofty bough to take a mouse from the hand...
...grasp the distinction by looking out from any one of a thousand promontories in the Northwest. Clear-cutting -- the indiscriminate leveling of every tree in an area -- has left the wilderness fragmented and scarred. Long after the last truck has pulled out, heavy with logs, and the debris has been torched, what remains is a blackened earth, pockmarked and studded with tombstone-like stumps. "It looks like Alamogordo, as if it's been nuked," concedes Dan Schindler, a Forest Service district ranger...
Though the timber industry has zealously replanted over the past two decades, the hallmark of old growth, biodiversity, has been lost. Gone are the broken-topped dead trees or "snags" favored by owl, osprey and pileated woodpecker. Gone the multilayered canopies and rich understory, the scattering of hemlock, incense cedar and sugar pine. Gone the centuries-old firs in their noble dotage. Increasingly, the forests have been transmogrified into tree farms of numbing uniformity, countless ankle-high seedlings and spindly saplings germinated from seeds selected for their productive capacity. The logging operations have tattered the seamless fabric of old growth...