Jennifer,

visit Savage River Iron Ore mine, (if it still exists) and experience real cold :-)

To the scatological I can add:-

1. The Spanish used to use squares of linen, but that would need revival of the flax industry before any competition.

2. There is that US practitioner of environmental living who laments that his training successes are more in getting people to turn water taps off while they clean their teeth, and less in getting them to wipe their butts with the leaves of trees.

So here's to logging!

Funny how 2500 bank workers can get the boot and nobody cares. The 700 loggers jobs for some reason have to be saved.

Nice blog Jenn. I, too, have a blog; a very progressive one.
http://educationalvignette.blogspot.com/

That's so... so... tear-jerkingy Australian!

God bless Tasmanian loggers. God bless woodchips. God bless the person who thought of selling Tasmanian woodchips to Japan so they could make cardboard and sell it back to us at an inflated price.

Ender, I'm not sure if nobody cares about the bank workers, but no, they didn't get much press which, like other things on this lovely blue planet, is not fair. People do care about the bank workers when the service they receive as a customer of NAB falls even further and bank charges keep increasing.

The analogy in logging is that people might wake up to the loss of forestry jobs when they go to their local hardware store and find the racks full of rainforest timber. Actually, if you go and look, you will find that this change is already well advanced.

Jobs are important and I want to keep mine too. But the major issue is natural resource management. We either grow our own, or we import it from somewhere else and export the costs and complexity of resource management to the developing world. Where, as we all know, the forest are often logged illegally to feed our consumption. Now I'm sure progressive liberals are not elitists, but isn't dumping our environmental impacts on the nations of the developing world a bit like exploiting their cheap labour in Dickensian sweatshops?

And so good to hear your happy little voice pl12. Our woodchips go to Japan etc because it's almost impossible to get a pulp mill past the green opposition in Australia.

Curse the green opposition, eh Rick? Bastards that they are - their domination of the Senate will be the end of us all...