h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

.
There exists a group of interesting little conundrums I think we all have in one form or another.
One, in our area, is trying to find some balance between ecology and economics; between parks and protected areas and what are called "tree farm licenses" or "managed forests" on Crown land.
Are we harvesting a renewable resource or strip mining the forests and destroying biodiversity?
Each side of the debate can present equally credible reams of statistics supporting entirely opposite positions.
On one hand you have "X-percent" of forests logged and "X-million" trees planted to replace it; on the other you have the outrageously arrogant proposition that we, as tenants, can "manage" a forest.

In a similar way, I want to have my patch, but I somehow don't necessarily want everyone else to have theirs, right?
For example, there is a particularly beautiful spot I love. It's a mountain-top from which one can see both the Selkirk and Purcell mountain ranges, with Kootenay lake in the valley between. This time of year the alpine meadows are flourishing with all colours of wildflowers (which onlylasts about 3-weeks at altitude) .

If ever there was a place to constuct a church out of nothing but nail-holes, this is it.

You want to go, don't you?
If I can get there,so can everyone else.
Which is the precisely the problem, no? If everyone went, it would cease to exist.
So.
Castlegar, the town we live near, has a sawmill and pulp mill as it's sole economic engine. No one wants to decimate the forests, yet no one wants to be unemployed, whether they are in forestry, the service industries, retail or Freelance Hitchhiker Guiding.
On any given day in any given pub, it's non-stop platitude-spouting and attitude-pouting without accomplishing much more in an afternoon than Parliament does in a year.
Anyone who can elucidate a Standard Unification Theory without resorting to the Mystical or Mathematics (even more mystical) would
doubtless be conferred HYEDT* status at minimum, if not Grand Poo-bah Lord King Wizard-in-charge-of-things status;( which, while possible, would take years to get through the Senate as most of them refer to time in chambers as 'nap-time').

*HYEDT: pronounced 'huh-yet';
"How'd You Ever Do That?" something like a knighthood, I suppose, excepting the proviso that you
have demonstrably done something worthwhile at least once.

PLT, Mick