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[Urbane Guerrilla]

The wife says we should have imported some koalas along with the eucalypts -- for decorative purposes. We have several varieties around, they being well adapted to rain being only seasonal, which is the case throughout southern and central California. The north end of the state gets the bulk of the rain -- unlike Spain, the plain getteth not the main rain.

The original, failed scheme was for eucalypts to supply railroad ties and be cheap and swift to grow. They got the wrong kind of eucalypts -- you couldn't put a spike into a balk of this wood without it splitting end to end. Perhaps they should have invented reinforced concrete railway ties a century or so sooner, but absolutely no one in the US was thinking in those terms at that time. They wrote it off as an idea that didn't pan out.

So the commercial use we found for these trees was to plant them as shelter-belts for fields, particularly the citrus orchards. Such plantings are all over my county. They just cut one of these down in my city because the trees were becoming senescent, having been planted back when pioneering Senator Bard was still a farmer, 1880 or so. Eucalyptus as pulpwood seems a growing development, and the local Procter & Gamble paper products plant -- towels and bath tissues -- uses this pulp, but it's shipped in from elsewhere and I don't know the source.

Intelligence, from satellite as well as other sources, is really the only thing that allows a nation to come up with sensible, effectual foreign policy. I'm not surprised the Australian government is willing to enter into a third-party agreement with ours to get these data.