Archives

I recently read a couple of letters referring to environmentalists as hypocrites for using wood. I too heat my home with wood as well as the sun. However, I don’t get my firewood from one of the last biological reserves left in Illinois; I get it from subdivisions which have already been senselessly bulldozed or from salvaged barns destined for the dump. In fact, my house is built from damaged tre

By Gus Bode
September 21, 1995

My electricity comes not from oil or coal, the extraction of which entails the leveling of extensive tracts of forest, but from the sun.

Yes, hypocrisy does abound in our society, but in this case it rests squarely on the shoulders of those who pretend to be making a better world while they live off the abundance of the past and condemn the future to struggle for every breath and every glass of clean water.

If you believe in the current mismanagement practices, you need only take a short trip to a Forest Service cut done in the last few decades to see that it does not return in oaks and songbirds, but in sumac and ticks. It is not a policy for the future but a rape of the past. We must all get beyond our infantile me, me, me attitude and begin to take steps to end the wasteful policies that have led us to the point of needing to burn our textbooks for fuel.