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Oh, Christmas Tree
Re: Ralph R. Reiland's Season's Greenies:

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that on December 24, 2009, Christmas Eve, I was featured by one your authors in the "Among the Intellectualoids" series. Ralph Reiland, wrote an article about Christmas trees. In the article he wrote the following:

The problem with live Christmas trees, says Ohio State economics professor Brent Sohngen, is that profit-seeking landowners in the U.S. are knocking down stands of carbon-retaining hardwoods in order to increase the number of less-carbon-retaining pine plantations, increasing carbon dioxide levels, a greenhouse gas.

This paragraph is misleading. The original article did examine hardwoods versus softwoods in the U.S. South, but that article did not address Christmas trees. Further, in the press release about the article, I did not say anything about Christmas trees, and I certainly did not state there that the conversion of hardwoods to softwoods, due to an increase carbon dioxide levels, was, or is, a problem with "live" Christmas trees.

Reiland misquotes me without apparently reading the original research article published in 2006, and without reading the Ohio State University press release about that article. Neither of these says anything about Christmas trees. 

Reiland should have just contacted me. If he had, he would have learned that Southern pine trees are not used as Christmas trees. I have bought quite a few cut (but previously live) Christmas trees in my life. I also have planted Christmas trees, pruned them, and sold them to the public. Christmas trees are firs and spruces, with some Scotch pine and white pine mixed in. Few, if any, landowners commercially grow and sell Southern pines for Christmas trees. Where exactly does Reiland get his Christmas trees?

It is of course possible that Reiland just assumed that the article was talking about spruces and firs and other Christmas tree species along with Southern pine. But rather than assuming, he could have just picked up the phone and asked me. Our study did not consider Christmas trees. They don't even grow on the sites analyzed in our study. Some of them do grow in higher elevations in the South, but Christmas trees are Northern species, not Southern species. 

I realize that from Reiland's perspective, to get published in the Intellectualoids series, it is easier to just make assumptions when he has what he thinks is a juicy detail. But you at The American Spectator ought to be interested in at least getting the story right. Reiland's story is not honest, and his dishonesty impugns his work in general and taints your series, where I see he has published several items. Reiland needs to be a lot more careful when he makes assumptions without checking the facts. 

The American Spectator should be embarrassed. You should demand that Reiland rewrite and repost his article. If Reiland wants to provide information on my study and then state that he believes the study implies that Christmas trees contribute to climate change, he can go right ahead. That would be stated as his belief, however stupid it is. At minimum he should rewrite that statement quoted above to attribute those points to himself rather than to me. If his point is to make fun of those you call "Intellectualoids," then you at least ought to get your facts right.
-- Brent Sohngen
Professor
Ohio State University

Ralph R. Reiland replies:
Brent Sohngen, professor, Ohio State:

Sorry, I got it wrong. I didn't know that "few if any" Southern pine trees ended up as Christmas trees. They all look the same to me, i.e., evergreens, with permanent needles, not like cherry trees or oaks with falling leaves.

Where do I get my Christmas trees? I used to get them from a local gas station. One year there was an owl in the tree and we didn't see it until we started to string on the lights. He must've been in there from he beginning, maybe all the way from the Carolinas, or China. In any case, he just stuck in there while we threw the tree on top of the station wagon, stopped to get some cheeseburgers, drove it home, threw it in the driveway, got it upright in the tree stand, etc. I was in high school at the time. My girlfriend (now my wife of 46 years) was with me when we picked up the tree and she was the one who spotted the big eyes looking out at her from inside the tree when she started to decorate. She screamed like a high school girl, which she was.

This year, one of our sons volunteered to get our tree. I asked him to get an artificial one, something I could put a big garbage bag over when the holiday was over and use again, already decorated, next year -- or to get a really small one if he got a real tree, those pencil trees, thin. He did get the tree and was nice enough to put it up while we weren't home. But when we got home it was gigantic -- and square. We have high ceilings but the tree was so large that he had to cut many feet off the top to get it in the room, so it ended up as a big square. "They had it in the wrong pile," he explained. "It was gigantic and in the small tree pile, the cheap pile, so I couldn't pass it up." I should take a picture of it. It might just be one of those tall Southern pines, one of the "few if any."

In any case, none of this was my key point. I don't know a fir from a spruce, but my main point was that I don't like those parents who tell their little kids to draw a Christmas tree on an old shopping bag and pretend it's the real thing. I think those kids, forced too much into denial and guilt, might grow up to be crotch bombers. That's what happened to the Detroit Mohammed or whatever his name is --zero sex, just guilt, and he ends up with a bomb in his underpants. Too bad that Freud isn't still around to see all this. 

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