Story here.
The Bohemian Grove is a campground in Monte Rio, California, where the Bohemian Club – an all-male “fine arts club” of uber-elite movers and shakers which often features in conspiracy theories – has an annual two-week retreat.
I guess they got tired of having all those stupid trees around when they go camping!
I heard it was modeled after the place where Caligula went to summer camp.
It’s a registration required site. How about taking a few seconds and quoting the relevant sections. I’m having trouble being outraged at this. Trees are cut down every day. What makes this different? Certainly you’re not relying on us to assume that this is a bunch of rich people doing something, therefore it must be bad. Are you?
I’m not registered and the link works for me. But here’s the gist:
Flashing on the old Kirk Douglas film, The Big Trees.
For those who don’t want to register with that site:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/07/12/MNGK0QV7HK1.DTL
So how will the hide the human sacrifices to Moloch?
Why do they want to cut down the trees? Where are they going to pee?
(One of the 'perks" of the annual Bohemian Grove get-together is that club ettiquette apparently lets you pee anywhere outdoors. It seems to be expected of you, in fact.)
Thanks. I still can’t generate any outrage. According to that article, they already have a permit to log there, and are asking for an increase. Since this isn’t in GD, I’ll wait for the OP to explain why this is so horrible. It may be, but it’s not obvious why. The Sierra club opposes it, but I expect them to oppose anything like this.
Funny how the wording of the two articles differs in spots. Like here, for example:
Members of the 135-year-old club have included … every Republican president in the last century.versus
Every Republican president, and a few Democrats, have been members of the 135-year-old, men-only club.
Hmmm, “men only”. Accidentally walked into a bar like that once.
Cutting down old-growth Redwood forests for no discernable reason seems pretty damn horrible to me.
Of course, it is their property, so the fucking assholes can do whatever the hell they want. That doesn’t make it any less disgusting.
How many trees is 1 million board feet? 1 bf = 1’x1’x1". So lets’ say we have trees with 5’ diameters for 150’ of height. Gives a square core of 3.5’ a side over 150’ of height.
That kind of tree gives 22 050 bf. So they’d need to chop 45 trees a year. How many trees do they have anyway?
While I have no reason to like the Bohos, and I’m an environmentalist, I don’t think there’s much of a story here. Fire suppression has allowed more trees to grow than is healthy for the forest, and the club wants to practice good forest management. They aren’t going to be logging on an industrial scale, and won’t be taking old growth redwoods. It’s Bohemian freakin’ Grove, not Bohemian Meadow, and while the membership might include such [del]luminaries[/del] undead baby-eaters as Kissinger and Schulz, there are some who love their little slice of nature. BG, while I typically find myself agreeing with your OPs, pick your fights, or you’ll wind up looking like a knee-jerk reactionary.
OK, best I can find gives us 8-10 Redwoods trees per acre. BG’s cite has the grove at 2700 acres in extent. Let’s take 9 trees/acre and assume 50% of the grove’s 2700 acres are filled with candidate trees. That means the club has roughly 12,000 trees available to harvest.
At 50 trees per year (my numbers), that works out to only 0.4% of the available trees being removed each year.
They gave a reason. Fire management. You might disagree with that reason, but it’s certainly “discernable”.
That was kinda my thinking as well. Five feet diameter might actually be small for a mature redwood tree. Of course, that would be at the base, and not the top. I don’t know how many trees they have, but the property 2700 acres.
Fair enough. I’m thinking I jumped the gun on this matter anyways.
The want to sacrifice rare trees to Moloch. That’s a discernable reason. 
\
But, let’s say that a tree is 1000 years old. If they cut down .4% every year, then every 5 years, they will have cut down two percent. So in 1/4 the lifespan (300 years) of a single redwood to grow to replace the old one they would have cut down all of them.
Redwood is valuable as a building material. Other than destroying the Earth as a sacrifice to Moloch, it would be quite profitable for them.
We should conquer them and build a cathedral on the site of their grove! One more magnificent than Chartres!
Coastal redwoods typically live to be about 600 years old, although some have been documented at over 1000 years. The grow to over 300 ft in height, and get to be 20 ft in diameter or more. Let’s be conservative and say 200 ft high and 16 ft in diameter. Using the formula from this site gives us about 120,000 board feet from one tree. That would be 10 trees per year to get 1.2M board feet.
This is a non-story. I work with wardens in a woods who have to cut down trees regularly for the health of the woods at large. I notice that the article tries to imply that 1000 year old trees will be destroyed. Is this reasonable? IME it’s usually younger trees (or older trees that are dieing and will probably bring others down) that are removed.
How do we know that?