While Earth First promotes mainstream ecological campaigns, elves, as they are often called, take a more direct approach, sabotaging research, burning buildings and placing spikes in trees to fend off loggers' chainsaws.
This includes a mysterious, maybe self-inflicted poisoning; A doctor burning down his research station as a way to avoid the winter; A disagreement that escalated into a hammer fight in 1996; A person becoming so violent they had to be locked in a storage locker for months.
However, more in-depth research on the reasons for suicide by burning, perhaps using qualitative research methods, may help to identify possible strategies.
These days, a growing amount of government money is headed to the farm-state favorite, biofuels, and to research on burning coal while capturing the resulting carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping smokestack gas.
Likewise, the Swiss, the Dutch and the Finns take great pains to ensure their high schools teach mathematics and science rigorously, so that they can continue to keep their research lights burning brightly and their industrial batteries fully charged.
Figuring out how to target the right drugs to the right patients "is the burning question" in cancer research, adds Memorial Sloan-Kettering oncologist Mark Kris.
An accelerated fusion energy development program, a "fast-track" approach, requires proceeding with a nuclear and materials testing program in parallel with research on burning plasmas, ITER.
The research included burning oil to clear areas of fog and smog, and constructing massive "artificial heat mountains" out of asphalt to increase rainfall.
