They wouldn’t send an anti-Big Government book to a grade school in Fairfax, Virginia.
But apparently, sending a book that calls their parents murderers of the earth to Oregon was hunky dory.
Loggers made a dramatic transition from tree-killing litterers to kindhearted animal lovers in a “Help the Forest” textbook for first-graders at Grants Pass schools.
An eight-page book was replaced with a decidedly rosier version after the original copy generated criticism for its negative portrayal of loggers.
Parents objected to a spread in the book that showed loggers chopping down trees and various bits of litter on the ground. The text on page 6 read: “These people do not take care of the forest. They cut down huge trees. They drop trash on the ground.” That was followed by a tearjerker page 7: “The trees are gone. The birds cannot find homes. The animals cannot find food.”
After news broke that the book had been pulled from classrooms, the publisher sent the district 108 new copies with a different take on loggers: “These people take care of huge forests. They put out fires. They cut down sick trees. Then new trees can be planted. Animals will still have homes. They will still find food.”
And stupid little lie-filled ideologically driven books get printed and sold for a profit.
Speaking of logging towns, for those of you who may be watching the History Channel’s “Ax Men” (aka: Average guys made to look like drama queens with chainsaws by the producers Show), the S&S Aqua Logging guys probably won’t be back next season.
It seems that they’ve been “aqua logging” without the proper permits.
Sure, to you and I it looks like they’re doing fishermen and boaters a service while making a tidy profit. But to the state Department of Natural Resources, they’re “wrecking and ecosystem”.
I’d like to see the DNR out there rescuing people whose boat sink because it runs into one of those logs. But I never will. They’ll be at home, toes up, watching the rescue on the nightly news.
I’ve watched the aqua loggers on two episodes so far.
1. These guys know zero about operating a work barge.
2. These guys know zero about rivers and currents.
3. These guys cobble together shit that doesn’t work.
They are lucky that they are alive, and the papa is an asshole who couldn’t supervise his way out of a wet paper bag.
In addition, he has only a portable sawmill that rips with a chainsaw, which wastes about 20% of each log he mills with it.
There IS a lot of value in logs on the bottom of rivers and lakes, and every state with trees has licensed it by now. The state take is pretty large, but you still get to make profit. Save us from the bozos like the guy shown here though, who built a 30-foot barge with 20-horse motor on it.
BTW, here’s a free idea for any entrepreneur who might want to get into that business: sell yourself to the state not as a “logger”, but as a “snag-boat service”. You’ll get a contract for clearing snags from the navigable channels (you’ll have to leave them as fish habitat elsewhere), and you’ll sell the un-millable trees as firewood (which is bringing $150/cord now) and the millable ones as timber.
The Army Corps of Engineers used to run a fleet of snag-boats, but quit in the ’50s, and there is a huge backlog of snag-clearing to do on every navigable river in the country.