Chad:

This is a very interesting take on Earth Day. In some instances people need to realize that in order to restore the natural landscape you must first destroy the current one. It is an outside-the-box form of thinking, but is sometimes necessary.

hoorah! I grew up in the Sooner State and what Mr. Love is saying is true. Those things cause so much damage to the western oklahoma landscape it's indescribable.

One other thing. If you can find a large one they make great stand trees. Deer never spot me in a Cedar. The smell is a good cover scent too.

Thoses harvesters are pretty awesome. Whats nice is that they leave a very small footprint compared to traditional logging practices. They also leave all the bark and tops in a neat row for a grinder to come behind it and turn it into mulch for new trees to be planted in. As you can see the trees are part of a plantation forest designed for regeneration over and over again. That head alone costs more than your house.

We could use a few of those down here in Florida for the meleluecas--they're nasty invasives that are drying up the swamp. But I'm not so sure how those monsters would do in the everglades--probably just sink into the swamp.

Funny how you think something good like a tree can even become harmful. It is a little ridiculous that we can not get this under control. Are they doing anything to fight this battle or is it one of those situations where, everything we try is not working and the tree is becoming immune to pesticides?

From what I read on wikipedia the red cedar makes good fence post because of its rot resistance, and is good for bedroom furniture because of its ability to repel moths. That sounds like an opportunity for someone to make a dollar by havesting these trees. So, there are plenty of money making oppurtunities out there for these trees to disappear.

I personally celebrated Earth Day by blowing the head off a turkey.

Muddog, with all due respect you're about as wrong as you can be.

I'll leave the debate over logging to others, however the rise of the eastern redcedar has absolutely nothing to do with logging. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

The eastern redcedar isn't spreading due to the logging of "native trees" because there simply aren't any commercially viable populations of native trees on the southern plains...that's why they're called "plains"...

The reasons for its spread are indeed man-made, but logging certainly isn't one of them.

I have to disagree on a few points. One: eastern redcedar doesn't sprout from a stump like, say, locust. Once you cut it it's dead. Two, it's also taking over native prairie that has never seen a plow and never been otherwise degraded. It cares not one wit whether the ground it's invading is damaged or healthy. It's an equal-opportunity invader

Now if by "healthy ecosystem" you mean a system in which fire and rotational grazing is practiced constantly then yes, it does tend to be somewhat controlled, but that's extremely labor-intensive work and trust me, an eastern redcedar will sprout in a beautiful, healthy pristine patch of short or midgrass prairie just as quickly as it will an eroded gully.

Ironically, it's the LACK of grazing and farming (and fire suppression) that's allowing the redcedar to spread. If you take a healthy quarter-section of good native grass and just let it sit with no grazing, no fire and no disturbance then I promise you in 15 years or so you'll have 160 acres of cedar.