No, we should save that discussion for the "Off The Topic" forum.
However, back to chainsaws and cutting down trees, there are 700,000 acres of Federal forestland that is exclusively second growth available for harvest in Oregon under both Clinton's Northwest Forest plan, and Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative. This year, in 2003, 46,000 acres of that was offered under "stewardship" and/or thinning contracts available to the general public. Only half of these contracts received bids and out of those only half made it through the bidding process to actual implementation. Why?
Logging companies don't want to do thinning and stewardship. They just want to cut trees and get the hell out of there. The company I work for took an 1100 acre thinning contract for the B.L.M. in 1999. They've worked on it steadily since then. They're about half done. This one contract supports a full time crew of 7 loggers, 3 truck drivers, 1 planning forester, 6 timber fallers, 1 harvester/forwarder operator, and 3 support staff.
Those "bean poles" you likely saw are representative of the timber that modern mills process. In fact, out of the three largest mills currently operating in Southern Oregon, the ideal log they want delivered to their yard is 34 feet long, and 9 inches on the small end. That's a pretty small tree. You couple that with the fact that 55% of remaining old growth that is cut these days and has been cut since 1992 on the west coast was exported as raw logs, rather than having been processed locally. This is even more true with Alaskan timber.
I personally am glad they're opening more logging up in Alaska, I like to cut old growth as mush as anyone, however I stand behind the belief that most of G.W. Bush's ideology satisfies the special interests of an elite few.