This topic is one of the first ones that really took liberal academia down a few notches in my eyes. I grew up with a national forest as my backyard, and my gr

This topic is one of the first ones that really took liberal academia down a few notches in my eyes. I grew up with a national forest as my backyard, and my grandfather was a logger in the area in the 70s. When I was a teenager, he and a bunch of old timers, including the Native American ones, were complaining about the forest management policies. They literally begged them to allow more thinning of the forest, more and larger control burns, etc. The out of town forest service (etc) PhDs all had a ton of reasons why they were wrong, and ignored their advice. At the time, I though the old timers just werent hip to science, were being curmudgeonly as old timers tend to be, and surely the PhD environmentalists knew what was what. Then, the pine beetle infestation hit, and they could not keep up with the needed thinning... and a few years after I left, boom, two ~500k acre fires hit, and it was absolutely devastating to the forest. At that point, I had learned how to read scientific papers, and started going back and looking at some of the justification papers for some of the policies (including wolf reintro) and I was astonished at how shoddy and poor the science was from these liberal academics. Not only was the science bad, but they essentially would ridicule the locals as a dumb redneck stereotype, given that the forest service etc would often cycle in people from across the country. The fires taught me that there is a lot of bad science out there, and that the term is often used as a cudgel against the lesser educated, so I can emphatically say, despite not being pro-Trump at all, that he was right on that one occasion. I said the same thing here when it happened and it spurred some decent discussion.