Word: forested
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...blue-gray dawn tickles the tops of the ponderosa pines at the Sugar Pine Recreation Area in California's Tahoe National Forest. Campers slumber in lakeside tents; bikers have yet to hit the trails. But all is not quiet on this cool July morning. A platoon of camouflaged figures equipped with rifles, pistols and bulletproof vests creep through manzanita brush with a police dog. Their objective: a marijuana plantation a few hundred yards from a well-traveled tourist area...
...Forest Service rangers stealthily approach, an unsuspecting Mexican laborer named Pedro Villa Garcia, 51, stands in a clearing. All around him the hillside is freshly terraced, irrigated by black plastic hoses and dotted with iridescent green cannabis. Villa Garcia peers down the path. Is that a black bear--a common local species--emerging from the morning mist? Suddenly he sees the rangers and dashes off through the brambles. But the police dog, a Belgian Malinois, catches up quickly, sinking its teeth into Villa Garcia's arm. Two rangers wrestle him to the ground and handcuff him. "We're good...
Armed combat is hardly what families hope to encounter as they head for their summer vacations in America's national parks and forests. But drug smugglers, methamphetamine cooks and cannabis cultivators are invading federal lands as never before. A U.S. Park Service ranger in Arizona's Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was gunned down by a Mexican pot smuggler last August. In Missouri's Mark Twain National Forest, 192 meth labs have been dismantled over the past three years. And marijuana farms are infesting Kentucky's Daniel Boone National Forest and Alabama's Talladega National Forest...
...fires had been set just for the hell of it. "What's really fueling these fires is the heritage of pastoralism," says Michel Thinon, a researcher at the Mediterranean Institute of Ecology and Paleoecology in Marseilles. He argues that millennia of human activity have favored the growth of pine forests, which are prone to fires, over the hardwoods that originally grew in the region. Now with more people than ever along the Med, municipal officials still obdurately refuse to reverse course. "Instead of planting the oak and ash, mayors plant quick-growing pines so they can point...
...that struggle can cut both ways. Dyslexics are also overrepresented in the prison population. According to Frank Wood, a professor of neurology at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., new research shows that children with dyslexia are more likely than nondyslexics to drop out of school, withdraw from friends and family or attempt suicide...