Clearcutting, or clearfelling, is a controversial forestry/logging practice in which most or all trees in a harvest area are cut down. Logging companies and forest-worker unions in some countries still support the practice for safety and economical reasons. Detractors see clearcutting as synonymous with deforestation, destroying natural habitats and contributing to global warming.

Contents 1 Types 2 Positive perspectives 3 Negative impacts 4 Clearcutting in British Columbia 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Types

Many variations of clearcutting exist, the most common professional practices are:

• Standard (uniform) clearcut – removal of every stem (whether commercially viable or not), so no canopy remains.
• Patch clearcut – removal of all the stems in a limited, predetermined area (patch).
• Strip clearcut – removal of all the stems in a row (strip), usually placed perpendicular to the prevailing winds in order to minimize the possibility of windthrow.
• Clearcutting-with-reserves – removal of the majority of standing stems save a few reserved for other purposes (for example as snags for wildlife habitat), (often confused with the seed tree method).

• Clearcutting contrasts with selective cutting such as high grading, in which only commercially valuable trees are harvested, leaving the others. This practice this can reduce the genetic viability of the forest over time, resulting in poorer or less vigorous offspring in the stand. Clearcutting also differs from a coppicing system, by allowing revegetation by seedlings.

Additionally, destructive forms of forest management are commonly referred to as 'clearcutting'.

• Slash-and-burn – the permanent conversion of tropical and subtropicals forests for agricultural purposes. This is most prevalent in tropical and subtropical forests in overpopulated regions in developing and least developed countries. Slash-and-burn entails the removal of all stems in a particular area. This is a form of deforestation, because the land is converted to other uses.
• Another controversial practice is the wholescale removal of irreplaceable ancient temperate and boreal forest.

[edit] Positive perspectives

Clearcutting is practiced to encourage tree species that require high light intensity environments. Generally, a harvest area more than two heights of the trees in the adjacent forest will cease to have its moderating influence on the microclimatic conditions.^[1] The width of the harvest area can thus determine which vegetative species will come to dominate, those with high tolerance to extremes in temperature, soil moisture, and resistance to browse will establish, in particular secondary successional pioneer species.

Clearcutting is sometimes used by foresters as a method of mimicking disturbance and increasing primary successional species like aspen, willow and Black cherry. Clearcutting has also proved to be effective in creating animal habitat and browsing areas, which otherwise would not exist without natural stand replacing disturbances such as wildfires, large scale windthrow, or avalanches.

In temperate and boreal climates, clearcutting can have an effect on the behavior of snowfall. The depth of snow in a clearcut area is usually higher than that in a forest or in other silvicultural methods that retain overstory, such as a shelterwood, due to a lack of interception and evapotranspiration. This results in a lower amount of soil frost, which in combination with higher levels of direct solar radiation results in snowmelt occurring earlier in the spring.^[2]

[edit] Negative impacts

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (December 2009)

Clearcutting can have major negative impacts. These have been cited as: poor quality re-growth, pest epidemics, increased wildfires, loss of biodiversity, loss of economic sustainability, loss of soil and increased environmental instability, and so on. Moreover the list of problems is growing. The response of governments around the world has been to marginalize community, environmental, social and academic concerns and defer to the logging industry.

In considerations of the almost universal practice of clear-cut forestry, governments have simply offered mundane facts in a manner similar to this. "Before the advent of modern forestry, high grading was the chief method of logging, with no regeneration for the areas cut, any re-growth converts to other uses or is left to regenerate naturally. In areas of the world where replanting is not undertaken, this continues to be the case. In the past and present, this kind of clearcutting without any replanting is practiced in forests where virtually every tree is valuable, as in an old-growth forest."

However, in practice old-growth wood often bears the scars af countless centuries, focusing immediate interest on optimally reproductive mid-growth trees, the forest powerhouses that in most market species are 200 to 500 yearts old. In recently undisturbed environments, old-growth forest really does shelter many optimal specimens that inspire clear-cut mentality as profit margins grow in the minds of reckless loggers. The deleterious effects of clear-cut on forestry are massive and multiple repairs have been attempted: three industry-wide and government supported attempts to improve clear-cut outlook include natural regrowth, careful selective seeding (monocropping) and burn-out. As with deforestation of primary forest, all repair attempts to date are poorly managed and sporadic, driven by profit, not unbiased forestry science. All attempts have failed. Another hopeful on the horizon is genetic manipulation.

Well organized and even costly repair attempts have turned into monumental failures. Where resource economies do not include purposeful seeding, the resulting clear-cut re-growth is always unhealthy and highly prone to massive fire damage. For example, in British Columbia, Canada where forestry is almost exclusively clear-cut practice, both the extent and the frequency of wild fire are rapidly increasing as a century of clear-cut, leveling 80% of the available forestry resource has resulted a huge biomass of flammable, unhealthy, and weedy fire fuel and pest food. In addition, in approximately one tenth of British Columbia forests, where biased industrial science dictated re-seeding to rule out "poor practice" then associated with unattended re-growth forests, complete destruction of tree-crop due to forest pests has resulted.

Clearcut re-seeding (that is improperly planned) has all of the same negative fire and disease effects of natural regrowth clearcuts. Another reseeding disadvantage, that is extensive where managed forestry companies exceed cuts and fill in slope margins with compulsory plantings, is mono-crop disease leading to soil failure. For instance, clearcutting on steep slopes always results high soil erosion rates. Tree species that can handle higher soil acidity (associated with soil erosion) and with roots suitable to retain and partially rebuild soil, such as pine trees in monocrop plantations. Unfortunately, extensive use of pine has wiped out millions of hectares of diseased and burned re-growth forests. The pine beetle larvae lacking the checks found in old growth and are now epidemic in North America. Pine beetles burrow into re-growth pine mono-cropping and kill the trees just when they enter their productive life-cycle point of rapid growth that should last 100 to 200 years. Dead clear-cut trees are accelerants in wildfires that are removing incresing amounts of the commercially useful vegetation in their path each year.

Burnout was not helpful, though it is the only option known to immediately protect property in the line of active fire. It was once thought that careful clear-cut burn-outs set to target just certain very congested patches and only certain undergrowth flammables would limit fire damage in expanding clear-cut zones. However, this did not limit wild fire incidence or extent across decades. In fact, it did create a huge cache of wild fire fuel, as forest cleaned by burnout become even more stressed by lack of biodiversity, soil erosion and disease.

Burn-outs are globally coupled with wildfire suppression. Suppression has disastrously increased re-growth fire fuel: by putting out wild fires, what burned small four decades ago becomes accelerant for much greater fuel mass during inevitable current and future fires.

[edit] Clearcutting in British Columbia

Clearcutting has created problems for British Columbia that many feel will persist, possibly for centuries. Much forestry science is certainly in agreement with that grim outlook, and government is currently guiding public relations and public education to manage that outlook. It is hoped that restricting human activity into and around clear-cut (80% of the Province of British Columbia) may lessen current outcomes for human fatality, fire incidence, and tree-crop loss.

There are no plans for regeneration of healthy forest, but forestry companies are turning to harvest natural regrowth every twenty years or so before fire and pests hit, providing a market in small wood objects like chop-sticks. No industrial attempt is made to mimic the healthy universal biodiversity of old-growth forest. When replants die out, the land is abandoned. To date, no government or science has costed and effectively assessed the complexity of restablishing biodiversity lost to clear-cut. Human beings simply complain about carnage or coddle concerns for a few isloated species. We do nothing meaningful to correct forest carnage. A few large corporations with a quota pointed at public placation have provided a few tiny plots of model old-growth in tourism venues. Governments claim to be protecting remote wildreness where a constant flow of cut timber is seen towed out to sea in huge carfully constructed ramps of tied logs.

Historically, human habitation has used clear-cut as a method to try and restrain a biosphere that would always recover within a few years and inundate human activity. Modern science and industrial methods have globally decimated the biodiversity that appears to sustain optimal health and survivability for life on earth. While we rush to make automobiles cleaner, we almost constantly fail to understand that this will have virtually no counter-effect equivalent to the massive global environmental damage resulting now from clear-cut activity. The single outlook for clear-cut is environmental devastation. We do not have the physical resource, the cultural controls or the science and technology to repair forests that we have turned into reservoirs of extinction. Any image of scorched earth under mono-crop forest's black poles in British Columbia accurately illustrates just a very small parcel of the future environment for deforested earth's undirected human population. However, this reality seems only to fuel the technocratic economies destroying environment today. Clearcutting is the ultimate deadly global conundrum to which no words can deliver justice. Our future, the coming millenium so clearly invites images of failed human economy and culture in a global desert, treeless and barren.

[edit] See also

• Even-aged timber management
• List of tree species by shade tolerance – shade intolerant and some intermediate species are primarily regenerated with clearcuts
• Seed production and gene diversity

[edit] References

• Roy, Vincent, Ruelb, Jean-Claude and Plamondon, André P. (1999). 'Establishment, growth and survival of natural regeneration after clearcutting and drainage on forested wetlands' in Forest Ecology and Management, Volume 129, Issues 1-3, 17 April 2000, Pages 253-267 [1]

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Clearcutting

Look up clear cut in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Belt, Kevin and Campbell, Robert, The Clearcutting Controversy - Myths and Facts, West Virginia University, accessed 14 December 2009
• CBC Digital Archives - Clearcutting and Logging: The War of the Woods
• Clearcutting in Maine
• Clearcutting on the Ritchiewiki
• Congressional Research Service (CRS) Reports regarding Clearcutting, accessed 14 December 2009
• Forest Policy Research page: California citizens to stop Sierra Pacifics plan to clearcut one million acres of Sierra forest, accessed 14 December 2009