FOREST FOR THE TREES
                    (C)1998 Alan M. Schwartz

What is a forest?  Environmentalist's cheap propagandistic swill 
proclaims a soaring immaculate arboreal confluence conceding 
dappled sunlight coolly tickling terra firmal musings of a gay 
(emotional, not behavioral) family plugging its oversize 
recreational vehicle into a natural AC power stanchion and 
expatiating the relative merits of its videotape inventory.  
Meditate upon simpler times of a leotarded Robin Hood and his 
boys prancing about in oaken Sherwood Forest.  I sit here with a 
yellow pad perched upon my naked pustulent knee, keeping tabs 
upon $8000 worth of futuristic bulk diamond-growing equipment, 
enfolded by the Cleveland National Forest (in California, where 
chemically inventive cerebral endeavor is doubleplusungood 
thoughtcrime), feeding a billion or so biting flies.

The local "forest" is a hundred square miles of accordion-pleated 
near vertical desert.  The topography is a violent 110 feet up 
and down at a gulp imitating a cheap rippled sneaker sole wrought 
large and choked with flammable debris.  It guzzles 20 inches of 
rain October through February.  The rest of the year it is a 
hellish broiler rich with every bloodsucking winged and crawling 
nightmare that can find marginally larger prey upon which to 
feast - me, for instance.  The "trees" are sprinklings of 
resinous and thorned bushes about two feet high.  Shaded valleys 
harbor deformed and diseased scrub oak.  Anything managing to 
turn green is infested with parasitic dodder (Cuscutaceae).  The 
predominant color is brown, as in desiccated dirt and dead wood.  
Quick, let's panic and save this for our children.

A portion of each year I do R&D at the University of Victoria, 
British Columbia, People's Republic of Canada.  Nestled within 
the heavily forested southeastern tip of Vancouver Island, UVic 
is a dank misery where moss grows on mud, wood, concrete, metal, 
asphalt, window panes, and some of the older faculty.  (One can 
even obtain mossy zinc from the Chemistry stockroom.)  The 
provincial flower is cubical wood rot.  Untold numbers of dirt 
jogging trails thread the temperate rain forest, poorer for lack 
of mosquitoes but enriched with plentiful sodden dog excrement.  
Some undergrads sought to lighten their financial load by quietly 
living in the forest.  They lasted less than a month.  In another 
incident a distaff matriculant was partially consumed as food by 
a mountain lion.  That is ecology.  Legal action was tendered 
because she interrupted the big cat's meal, committing purposeful 
molestation of a protected species.  Perhaps she did not see the 
forest for the trees.

Before it was plowed under into a bean field and then condos and 
a shopping center, I lived across the street from an orange grove 
of about 3000 trees.  Spring and fall were memorable for air 
luxuriously gooey with the mating scent of orange blossoms.  The 
rest of the time it was aphids and whiteflies.  The latter were 
one millimeter dust motes reproducing in such profusion that the 
roads ran slick and windshield wipers stalled.  Call it one 
whitefly for every star in the sky, out to the Andromeda galaxy.  
There was not enough poison in the world to put them down.  
Housing associations have Conduct Codes and Rules.  A resident 
harboring pestilence will drown in tenacious court actions lest 
the value of surrounding houses be compromised.

Amazonia (tropical rain forest, aka jungle) is feted as the lungs 
of the Earth, cornucopia of species diversity, holy grail 
cloistering untold pharmaceutical wonders, privileged Eden 
cuddling unspoiled Amerindian throwbacks, and ultimate Mecca of 
all Environmentalist hegiras (which never quite materialize, of 
course).  Amazonia is an insufferably hot, wet, ant-infested, 
tainted torment bursting with disgusting and incurable diseases 
and parasitemias.  Its soils are untillable, nutrients residing 
in the canopy and high labile concentrations of iron and aluminum 
transforming dirt into near-ceramic laterite upon clearing and 
subsequent oxidation.  Amazonia's population teems with skin 
ulcers and swarming intestinal fauna - every cestode, nematode, 
and trematode on the planet - plus bacterial (pathogenic amoebas 
large enough to see), viral, and other microscopic afflictions 
sufficient to scythe a population into isolated subsistence 
farmers chomping empty gums at age 25.  To be a woman in 
childbirth or an infant is to be mostly dead.

The seductive social engineering warmth of "save the forests" is 
inversely proportional to your distance from them.  Forests are 
not wood lots or other efficient commercial plantings.  Forests 
are Mother Nature's unshaven armpits exacting severe penalties 
from all who encounter them.  Humanity evolved in the veldt, and 
for good reason.  Those who remained squatting in the jungle 
(tropical rain forests!) asked for nothing and got what was 
coming to them.