> My point being, does anybody have any pangs of guilt over their use of old growth trees for their boats? I know I do.

Although the author of the article has some good points, I don't think his intention is to make us feeling guilty for every wood-related product we use.

In Norway, we don't have the same scale of centralised timber-industry that the author refers to in the article, in stead a large part of the industry consists of smaller farmers carefully administrating the wood resources they inherited from their ancestors by taking out what timber is needed and replanting continously to renew the resources they're due to leave for their descendants. They deliver the timber to more or less centralised mills which put most of the timber to use as good quality wood products.

But clearly we see the tendency to more centralising in the future. My hope, though, is that the public environmental "conscience" will lead to a timber industy that balances use and renewal in order to make the timber resources useful for generations to come.

Finally to my point: I would not feel guilty, and I don't think anyone else should either, by using wood for boatbuilding, either it be old growth trees or farm trees. To me it is an example of good and environmental sound use of wood compared to the alternatives beeing fiberglass, plastic and other artificial, non-degradable materials made from lesser renewable resources.

In stead of feeling guilty over my boat-building and other reasonable wood consumption, I would rather look more into some of the points at the end of the article. I also think that the author should have included a "Use more recycled products" in his "to-do"-list, meaning news-papers, toilet-paper, packaging-products and even xerox-paper made from recycled paper as an example.

Well, enough "mostly-off-topic" for tonight.

Totto