Edward Abbey’s quote below from The Monkey Wrench Gang was meant to describe clear cut logging and the ‘tree farms’ that followed, though decades old, could just as easily be applied today to consumer credit devotees, currency speculators, aquifer depleters, etc. In each and every case the lure of the free lunch ends the same."In clear cutting", Abbey said, "you clear away the natural forest, or what the industrial forester calls 'weed trees', and plant all one species of tree in neat straight functional rows like corn, sorghum, sugar beets or any other practical farm crop. Then you dump on chemical fertilizers to replace the washed away humas, inject the seedlings with growth forcing hormones, surround your plot with deer repellents and raise a uniform crop of trees all identical. When the trees reach a certain prespecified height [not maturity; that would take too long] you send in a fleet of tree harvesting machines and cut the fuckers down. All of them. Then burn the slash, and harrow, seed, fertilize all over again, round and round and round again, faster and faster and tighter and tighter until, like the fabled Malaysian Concentric Bird which flies in ever-smaller circles, you disappear up your own asshole."
