Great story in the LA Times today. A grad student does a routine job of research, gets a tiny little mention in a major science publication. But--shock! Awe!--his results make the Big Wood industry look bad, so they try to suppress even that little bitty article. Bright fucking move guys--the story is now all over the place:

after his research appeared in the online version of the journal Science in January, the Oregon State University graduate student began to feel like a lightning rod. A federal agency briefly yanked funding for his project, irate politicians and timber interests e-mailed Donato's dean to complain, congressmen grilled him, and professors at his own university tried unsuccessfully to keep the paper from being published in the print edition of Science.

Why, fer chrissakes? What could this paper have shown that they were so desperate to suppress? And why right now? Yeah, you guessed it...

His principal finding — that post-fire logging hindered forest regrowth — was hardly revolutionary. But the study, with Donato as lead author, was published just as Congress was considering legislation to make it easier for timber companies to undertake salvage logging of dead trees after fires on federal land. That bill, backed by the Bush administration and recently passed by the House, is based on an underlying assumption that burned forests recover more quickly if they are logged and then replanted.

Donato's results provided ammunition to the bill's opponents — and more broadly to environmentalists fighting salvage logging, which makes up roughly a third of the timber sales from national forests across the country. They argue that dead trees provide not only wildlife habitat, but the nourishment for a new forest that will ultimately provide a richer, more diverse ecosystem. That is anathema to timber advocates, who see dead wood left to rot unharvested as not only counterproductive but a waste of resources.

Here's hoping that the student, Daniel Donato, doesn't find himself inexplicably blocked out of grant money and opportunities to work in his chosen field. The kind of people who led the campaign to keep Juan Cole out of a job at Yale because he didn't toe their policy line would hardly hesitate to tramp this kid like a bug.

Go read. It's a well-written story and not too long, considering that it covers just about every issue we harp on here: corporate convergence with Republican politics, abuse of the natural landscape for sheer excessive profit (yes, children, there is such a thing as "excessive profit," I know you don't see those two words next to each other very often today but you know it when you see it.) Here's just one kicker:

Columbia describes itself as the largest helicopter logging operation in the world. Three years ago, the wife of Columbia's co-founder donated $1 million to the college for an endowed professorship.

The company largesse also reaches into politics. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Columbia and its executives have given more than $300,000 to state and federal GOP committees and candidates, including some $22,000 to the Republican author of the salvage bill.

Yeah, yeah, I know. You are shocked and horrified, as was I.