Interesting debate, with Don and Herb on one side perhaps, and
Janet and Scott on the other, of whether the proposed survey
will accomplish its goals, and even whether those goals are
valid or not.

I would not condemn the survey simply because it contains
language which may be deemed political, so the original post
makes no sense to me at all. As others have posted, this is now
a political as well as a science problem. For a group of Audubon
societies to work on this problem, they have added a science
component. That is in their nature and in their charter. No
problem.

I would also not condemn the survey because it may fail to meet
some arbitrarily high scientific standard. We have had a number
of threads on scientific elitism on tweeters over the years.
This appears to be another. Since the politicians control
funding for the real scientists, it appears that the day of the
amateur may in fact have returned, in areas which the political
masters of the day do not want research done.

Finally, suggesting that this is not the arena in which this
battle will be won seems to me to be an abdication of
environmentalism, for its own sake. Why should a group with
environmental goals, environmental interests, and possibly even
some environmental skills, abandon an environmental approach to
what is an environmental problem, just because there are other
approaches to this problem. What happens when you put all of
your eggs in one basket, and that basket looses it public
appeal? It seems to me that we cannot abandon the environmental
argument for other apparently (at this point in time) better
arguments.

The long term balance between "log it all" and "save it all" in
the forests will mirror the balance of environmental attitudes
in the community. When more people become involved at the
environmental survey level, the balance shifts in favour of
preservation. If they could get 10,000 school children
wandering around the forest on this survey, it would affect the
balance greatly. It may detect nothing that meets an
impossible legal standard, but it would get the legislators'
attention.

Brent

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Brent Beach, Victoria, BC, CA