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.