Martha Mendoza skillfully tells a really interesting human story -- which also happens to be of major significance and largely untold in the media. An AP investigative reporter, she writes a great lead: "Daniel Hughes loves stealing trees. He loves the pungent mix of blue chain-saw exhaust and spicy fresh wood. He loves the loud snaps that resonate from a Western red cedar as it teeters. He loves slip-sliding on the forest floor in his spiked boots, hauling cedar to his pickup in the Olympic National Forest. He even loves the tension. Stealing trees is, after all, breaking the law. The only thing 38-year-old Hughes doesn't like about cutting down old growth is going to jail, which is where he is now. But that doesn't happen to tree thieves often." The US Forest Service says that one in ten trees cut from National Forest land is taken illegally. The problem, Mendoza reports, plagues both public and private land from Washington's Olympic Peninsula to the Adirondacks. The kicker: "The thieves, forestry experts say, are mostly chronically unemployed lumbermen seething with resentment over conservation measures that have reduced cutting. They generally feel entitled to what they take." (See: http://www.sltrib.com/2003/May/05182003/nation_w/58013.asp)