RIP Pacific Lumber

Well, well, well-- According to the LA Times, Pacific Lumber is on its way towards bankruptcy and collapse. As bad as this will undoubtedly be for much of the working population of Humboldt County, a county that is utterly dependent on logging revenue, I see this as an unqualified good-- that is, unless some other equally reprehensible company comes in and takes over in their stead. But, by the grace of Allah, hopefully this will not happen. This paragraph from the article cuts it cleanly:

"Last summer, Pacific Lumber opened a high-tech $30-million sawmill, which cuts small logs up to 2 feet in diameter. It was the company's way of adjusting to the increasing scarcity of big trees in a forest logged for more than a century." [ My emphasis, CJ ]

This is something that needs to be understood, and immediately, for it's the same thing with the oil in the Middle East. When dealing with such unsustainable and unrenewable products, the jobs will go the way of the trees. It's simple arithmetic. And, yes, these trees are unrenewable even though they grow from the ground. The trees, and the forests in which they are anchored, have been around for millennia. Entire ecosystems get disrupted and destroyed as a result of the clear-cuts, and these magisterial trees are replaced with common shrubbery-- hardly the stuff from which wealthy homeowners want to build their decks.

In other news of the dying, I see that Hunter S. Thompson has killed Will Self.