Are the climate/environmental issues important to you?

[Ban my account ffs!]

It's really sad how many of the great trees of the American landscape are nearly extinct or severely reduced because of introduced pests:

The biggest among these is the American Chestnut, which is more or less extinct in the wild, but was once the largest and most common tree in the eastern 3rd of the U.S.  The Chestnut Blight was introduced from Asia when Chinese Chestnut was brought here.  Immediately, it spread like wildfire, killing every American Chestnut.  What remains today are root sprouts here and there in the woods, but the blight returns and kills the trees before they produce any nuts.
Biologists are trying to find naturally resistant chestnut trees (there are still a couple trees living out there in mostly isolated locations) and cross them with the genes that make the Chinese Chesnut resistant to the blight.  They will then be planted all over.

The American Elm used to dominate streetscapes in America.  The trees were the perfect street tree.  They grew in an umbrella shape, growing up and then out, covering and shading the streets and yards.  They had hard, cross grained wood that didn't easily break up in storms, were very disease resistant, long lived, and had deep roots that didn't disturb sidewalks or streets.  No other native tree is anywhere near as adapted to street tree use as the American Elm.
Enter Dutch Elms Disease.  Introduced from Europe in the 1930s, it spread like wildfire in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, killing most of the Elms in American cities, denuding entire neighborhoods of their trees.  What resulted was a sunnier, hotter area with no trees.

So what did they replace the elm with in northern areas?  Green Ash.  Some cities in the northern U.S. have as much as 50% of their street trees planted as ash.  Enter the Emerald Ash borer, brought on infected wood from China in the mid 1990s, it was discovered in Detroit in 2002.  Now, thanks to careless people carrying infected firewood or other infected wood in their cars, it has spread much much faster than it ever would naturally (the bugs only fly about a mile or so within their lives).  The borer infects nearly every ash tree it comes across and kills each and every one.  The larva feed on the interior wood, zig zagging around the tree and girdling it, ultimately killing it.

The White Pine used to be the king of trees in the northeast and Great Lakes.  Growing to 200 feet tall, they were giants and covered vast areas.  They were nearly all cut, and poor logging practices ensured they wouldn't regrow.  White pine can regenerate well after being cut if you follow proper procedures.  If you leave a few seed trees, you can burn the logged area after you have logged it, and the seeds will blow onto the exposed soil and germinate.  Unfortunately we didn't do that.  We cut every tree, and then waited a few years.  When nearly all of the viable seeds already on the ground had germinated and started to grow, the federal government ordered the areas to be burned because the dried out slash left behind from the loggers was starting catastrophic forest fires that had led to the destruction of entire towns.  All of those little baby pines were killed in the fires and any viable seeds were gone because they had already germinated.

So, now White Pine covers about 3-5% of the land it did before the mass logging.  To add insult to injury, and introduced fungus from Europe, white pine blister rust, wounds and kills trees in many areas.

While this doesn't always kill the trees, it leaves them deformed and unusable as saw timber.  Because of this, most of the forestry industry does not plant white pine despite its vastly superior wood.  Instead, they have vastly overplanted Red Pine in the northern states which is just waiting for its next introduced species to decimate stands.

We have vastly changed the composition of our forests in the name of industry.  The amount of economic loss caused by poor environmental decisions in the past is immeasurable.  What could have been a vibrant and profitable logging industry in vast swaths of the northeast and Great Lakes is now reduced to less desirable species that can only be used for paper pulp (spruce, aspen, birch)

[RIP Robert H Bork]

Yes, because certain people will use the issue to screw the rest of the country (like the House did last Friday).

Exactly!

[muon2]

Climate and environmental issues are important. As a number of posts have noted, global warming is not the only issue in this category, though I think it is part of the whole scope of environmental concerns. Environmental issues are key to a high quality of life, whether that be open space protection and local point-source pollution, or global issues that can be harder to reverse years from now like introduced pests, and yes, climate.