The urge to 'steal' plant material is hard wired in our DNA. our closest living relatives are browsers of vegetation & we have a natural urge to pick things. Taking cuttings & propagation material from institutions & public plantings has less guilty feeling attached to it than most forms of theft especially if one is an accomplished propagator & knows what to take & how best to grow it. Having said that if there is something one wants for a genuine reason of interest & enthusiasm for growing most organizations & institutions have facilities to give permission for it. The (growing) exception is the increasing number of institutions who have signed international agreements to restrict distribution of material only to similar institutions & totally exclude the public & commerce from access. Here in Australia some of our state botanic gardens have done so & some have not. I suspect that there will be less felling of guilt attached to material removed from those than from the 'open' ones who consider requests for material on an equal basis from individuals, commercial entities & other institutions. The most successful way to achieve a free exchange of plant material into & out of institutional plantings is to establish a personal relationship of trust & mutual benefit with staff at the coal face. For example nursery managers & head gardeners & propagators. Those who are actually tending & responsible for the plantings are in the best position to know what can be taken without harm & are far enough up the hierarchy to do so with impunity. This gives some semblance of honor to such exchange & bypasses the horrid web of red tape which complicates life if one goes through the official channels & deals with the desk jockeys who have hold of the end of the strings. This could possibly be accurately sub-titled: 'memoir of a lifelong indiscriminate plant propagator' :))

You can't disturb a nest once it has eggs in it. If you at all prevent a hawk from raising it's young, it's called a 'take'. The hawk may or may not abandon the nest and the young may or may not get the food they need to grow and if any of the disturbance is your doing, US Fish & Wildlife will be secretly filming you and trying to build a case. Many people get on a 'witch hunt' over hawks and 'their rights'. It's a small minded neighborhood thing because many view the hawks now as cool thanks to nest cams. My advice is to remove any tall trees that would be an ideal nesting site if budget allows, or make them unappealing before nesting season by paying a tree climber to add a fake racoon or fake owls that move, or other bright, big objects that move such as huge balloons with eyes, large shiny pinwheels with tape that flashes in the breeze. Add several so as to overwhelm the hawk as it first approaches it's old nesting area. It may not stop the hawk from coming to the area but may pursuade it to nest elsewhere. Just make sure that the type of hawk you're trying to encourage to move isn't considered endangered in your area. Your local game commission may have that information. A pic provided to them will be helpful. I know red shouldered hawks are becoming more scarce due to red tail hawks taking over good hunting and nesting grounds. Just check with your local authorities before taking any action.

A forest will choke out a thicket, I often recomend that fruit and nut trees be planted on purpose, so that we lock up carbon and produce food for ourselves, and chocke out the brush plants that are unpleasent to walk through. When you go on a hike along a tail it seems that you are always either bordered by clearing/lawn or by a thicket, but once you break through that thicket you can useually travle quite quickly and easily and have plenty of space to move about. The main reasonfor removing trees and brush historicly wasn't to make things more pleasent, it was to open up land for agricultural use. with a field we can grow staple cerial grains, or legumes, or use it as pasture for animals, while some trees may provide seasonal food for some critters it takes alot of work to survive off of them year round (and trust me when I say thing, willow does not taste that good) . Our modenr day lawns were not contrived from thin air, you need to look at were they came from to understand how they fit in. Lawns are popular mainly in the south (sure, lots of people like them, but in the south they are sick for them) the south had a large portion of its caucasian inhabitants come from scotland (the southern drawl is very closely related to the scots accent) in schotland they have huge green field that are kept down to a few inches all summer long, this is because there is alot of rain and people raise sheep. Now, in the south there isn't as much water in the summer, and there aren't as many sheep, but people still liked the look of home so a lawn with mowers and irrigation is what they came up with.

So it is clear from scientific studies that physiologically, anatomically, and instinctively, man is perfectly suited to a diet for fruit, vegetables, nuts, and grains. And plenty of carrion, although our delicate modern minds don't want to think about that. Quite a few archaeological sites of extremely early human habitations (2.5-1.8 million years ago, Homo habilis and Homo erectus) have yielded bones showing marks of human teeth made AFTER marks made by teeth of other species, as well as marks of early stone tools (and the presence of such tools, often broken and so discarded) indicating dissection of those animals. Analysis of human coprolites, or what would politely be described as fossilized dung, from Homo erectus sites already shows evidence of extensive meat consumption (actually coprolites are really nifty once you get over the ick factor), and human-made stone tools purely for the use of hunting, such as spear tips, first appear approximately 1.5 million years ago. That doesn't even allow for animals intentionally killed by such things as thrown stones, wooden or unmodified-bone implements such as clubs or fish gorges made from thorns, trapping, hand-catching (such as fish "tickling", egg collecting, or hunting for animal dens to catch extremely young animals), as well as the "lucky find" of an animal that died of natural causes. Mollusc shells (snails, clams, oysters) abound in Paleolithic sites located near water. As for the "impossibility" of eating raw flesh "without the use of a knife and fork", sorry Jen, but that's outright bunk. Hunter-gatherer tribes (what few survive Western, well, let's call a spade a spade, invasion and habitat destruction) do still do so - two of the anthropologists I studied under at university had spent many years in the Fifties, Sixties, and Seventies living with hunter-gatherer tribes as members of the tribes would live, one specializing in the Kalahari and the other with tribes in New Guinea and the Amazon. A great deal of perfectly edible animal protein does not even require being so much as smacked with a rock, although most of us wimpy Westerners wouldn't consider grubs, insects, raw eggs from wild-bird nests, and such as "edible". For example, Australian Aborigines who enjoy "bush tucker" (their traditional - and we're talking a good 50,000 years here - foods gleaned from the wild) covet a large moth larva called a witchetty grub, which would have most North Americans barfing on their shoes. Even some of the survival training of the American military include obtaining and consuming raw animal protein with one's bare hands, the basic assumption of the course being that one has lost all of one's equipment and being in an situation where building a fire with the old spinning stick technique isn't practical. (Someone I know went through advanced survival training and absolutely loved to tell gross-out stories about his dining adventures.) Personally, I agree with those who say that humans, like many of the other primate species, have evolved to be opportunistic omnivores - we as a species did and will eat pretty much anything we can get our grubby little hands on. It's only in relatively recent times that we've been able to afford to get as picky as we are now. As for whether I wear fur, leather, etc., I used to have a mink collar for my peacoat but it was cut from a coat from the 1960s and just got too tatty to wear, I have had hats and mittens from the skins of rabbits raised as food, and I once had slippers made from moosehide from a moose hunted for food. My leather jacket wore out and I haven't replaced it because they're too expensive. I wear leather shoes (or fabric ones) because plastic ones make my feet stinky and prone to fungi like athlete's foot, and as a previous poster points out, there's the whole petrochemical issue to non-leather shoes (besides fabric and latex rubber, and I dare ya to go through a New England winter in canvas shoes LOL) so you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. IIRC, anti-fur groups typically throw red paint (PETA claims that they do not advocate nor do they sponsor such actions), not blood, on fur-wearers. One reason I have heard straight from the mouth of one of these eco-vandals is that paint cannot be removed without destroying the fur, while blood can be removed fairly easily. (And then there's that minor hypocrisy of using blood to protest killing, unless these folks are donating their own blood to do it...)