Landowner's Conference

I'm always amazed at the knowledge of these people speaking at these conferences we go to. We've been to several over the years, in different places, and other small affairs on people's land. Each time we attend I have the same reaction to their remarks about trees and invasive plants - kill them all! To me it seems completely against everything these people (forest rangers, naturalists, and otherwise extremely intelligent and highly educated in their field of science) should be professing. Maybe they were naive, like me, about these things when they first started out and then the more they learned about nature and how basic principles still exist, they were able to be more objective. The first time we were taking a walk on someone's property, they were talking about thinning out the forest and proceeded to show all of us how to kill a tree. All you do is make a couple of hatchet marks on the sides of the tree and spray it with Round-Up (by the way, is still the weapon of choice). Voila, that tree is basically dead! It was killed for numerous reasons such as being misshapen or hindering the growth of other, more valuable trees . Yesterday's talk focused on killing these plants on the invasive plant list and more specifically what will get the job done. Some of these are very pretty plants but this guy had no use for them at all. At the end of the day, we listened to a girl talk about encouraging more wildlife on your land and for awhile I actually thought she felt like I do about all the ferns we have at the cabin, but then in the end she said her thought was to use chemicals to kill them (not all of course). Oh well, that's probably the closest I'll come to having someone agree with me.