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errace BC na Schreiber Letters to Letters to the editor are encour- They can discuss any topic but aged. are subject to alteration, and content, at the discretion of the editor. Please send your .signed letters to: Ba Dame BO Re SLO5 or drop them off at the News, located centrally in Simcoe The News, Ontario, POT 2WO, Plaza. Arthur Blac By Arthur Black I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree Amazing. The poet Joyce Kilmer wrote those lines without even laying eyes on the big old maple out my back door. Now there is a tree that's more beauti- ful than half a dozen poems, the entire Top Ten Hit Parade and a couple of three-act plays put together. Acer Saccharum it's known as, among botanists. To us less learned folks it's a plain old sugar maple and it is as I say, a beauty. Thirty feet high. A good three feet around the trunk. Festooned with _bird houses in the summer (some Page 4, Terrace Bay-Schreiber News, Wednesday, November 11, 1987 . The Terrace Ba News is published every Wednesday by: Laurentian Publishing ci,ojie copies 35 cents Co. Ltd., Box 578, Terrace Bay, Ontario, POT 2W0. Telephone: (807) 825-3747. - SGbecripfive catunspar your Cc) Second Class Mailing Permit Number 0867 in town $14.00 cn Ete =: ee a ae ee Ken Lusk out of town $18.00 -- | the editor in length Terrace Bay, man-made, others freelance) and bedecked with bird feeders and suct bags in the winter, my old maple is a hostel for the swarms of jays, finches, chickadees and grosbeaks that flap by here every year en route to their summer and winter hangouts. Works for me too, that maple. Holds up one end of my ham- mock for a couple of months each summer. I've spent more than one muggy afternoon under that tree, rocking gently and gazing at the hypnotically shifting patterns on the undersides of the maple leaves above, blocking out the sun. There may be more pleasant ways to while away a blistering hot July afternoon. but I don't Production Co-ordinator «cgi oeueaties Nancy Parkin Julie Wright Gayle Fournier Member of Ontario Community Newpopers Association and The Canadian Community Newspapers eu Association It is now drug awareness week Addiction Awareness Week, November 15-21, is an opportuni- ty to draw attention to the fact that we all can easily become abusers of different substances. The fact is that when we talk about drug abuse, we tend to - think of young people. A few statistics help us to put this in perspective. Approximately 70 per cent of know of them. Yessir, it's a wonderful old tree, my maple. A pity that it's dying. Nothing to do with age or fun- gus diseases or hemorrhage from the dinky little hook that holds up my hammock. My maple is dying from the same thing that your maple's dying from. That same thing that's killing all out maples. Acid rain. Or so they tell me. To tell the truth, my maple looks pretty much the way it did last year and the year before. It turns colour a little earlier and sheds its leaves a little faster, but other than that it's pretty much the same. But the experts tell me it's dying and you know what -- I believe them. Because I've never heard biologists talk the way they talk about the threat of acid rain. Usually, scientists talk and write in academic-ese -- 'the language that is dispassionate, unemotional and, well, boring actually. But the menace of acid rain is provoking some specialists to vocabulary that's downright frightening. "A catastrophe in the asking" warns a McGill University pro- fessor. "We're on our way to disaster" says an Ontario botanist. How serious is acid rain? Tom Hutchinson of the Institute of Environmental Studies:has -2 young people use alcohol to some extent (and we must remember that it is against the law for minors to_use alcohol outside of the home and without parental consent). : Around 25 per cent of youth use tobacco (and it is against the law for merchants to sell tobacco to those under 16 years-of-age). One in four of Ontario high chillingly blunt answer to that: "It is" he says "the AIDS of trees." It's not as if we haven't been warmed. Acid rain has. decimated the forests of several European countries, particularly West Germany. Remember the Black Forest? Chances are in a few more years that's what we'll all have to do -- remember it. Its famous evergreens have been among the hardest hit. In North America though, it's maple trees -- so far, anyway. Sugar maples have been paricu- school students report (1985) having used marijuana or hashish in the previous year. Less than 10 per cent of stu- dents report using LSD; less than five per cent used cocaine, or inhalants (glue), or speed. These statistics contradict all see page 13 larly susceptible. Quebec's once _ ye lucrative sugar maple industry is in a shambles. Why? Because according to a McGill University study, 80 per cent -- 80 per cent -- of the province's maple trees are dead or dying. Economic losses to Quebec so far: $110 million and climbing. Can we turn it around? Hard to say. Trees don't respond t a couple of aspirin and a warm poultice. Foresters know that once you've interrupted a forest's cycle, the interruption can last for decades. There's talk of slow release organ- ic fertilizers and promising bone meal treatments, but everyone knows what really has to be done. And that's not likely to happen. Not while you have a U.S. President who can say -- as. Reagan said when he was gover- nor of California: "Seen one red- . wood, you've seen 'em all." Not when you have a provin- cial Ministry of Natural Resources which can publish a booklet listing all the possible causes of maple tree "dieback" -- everything from insects to fungus to viruses...but never once men- tioning the MNR "R" words. Air pollution. All I know is, somebody better . act soon. Unless we want to hear our kids standing up in school assembly singing revised lyrics to our semi-national anthem: "The Maple Leaf..For A Little While."