Forests for People: Forests & People - Environment and Logging, 1960's Pictures

Environmental Concerns

As the National Forests were required to supply more of the nation’s wood the public became more and more concerned about the impacts of logging on public lands. The more of it they saw, the less they liked it.

Clearcut in Oregon Coast Range, early 1960's

Getting wood out of mountain forests is not a pretty business. Unlike farming with the big machines moving in a straight line across a flat landscape harvesting wheat or corn, harvesting mature trees is more like violence and chaos. Towering trees are cut, crashing down, tops and limbs are smashed and scattered, the logs are skidded (drug) by tractors, or cables suspended from tree spars or metal towers, to a central landing. There the logs are loaded onto trucks, hauled down narrow, mountain logging roads to highways and on to sawmills. It’s a big, rollicking, stay-outta-my-way business.

Glen getting ready to "top" a spar tree.

After logging, a wooded area is scared by skid trail, stumps, limbs and tree tops (slash) scattered helter-skelter and a maze of roads. The beauty of the area is lost and, unlike harvesting wheat or corn, it will take years before beauty is reestablished by new trees. The forest’s beauty will come back, young trees, vigorous, colorful and growing toward maturity will do it, but it takes a good chunk of a person’s lifetime to happen, so it’s a hard thing to accept - and wait for.

Good forestry practices set money aside from the sale of logs to take care of the land and get a new forest growing. Slash (the limbs and tree tops) is burned, or cut in small pieces and scattering so decomposition will return the nutrients to the soil. This reduces the possibility of future fires by reducing the fuels. Good logging operations construct water bars on skid trails and little used roads to prevent soil erosion, they spread grass seed on roads and skid trails and they replant small trees or leave strong mature trees to reseed the logged area naturally. Well-designed tree harvesting practices leave areas along streams untouched to protect the water and keep it cool for

Glen, on the way up.

fish. Even where these good procedures are done, it is several years until a logged area will be judged beautiful by most of us.

It’s the ugliness that is offensive, not the science, the harvesting procedures, the water bars, new grass or planted trees. The problem is, it takes decades for tree seedlings to become a forest and in today’s world, we want results — fast!

Harvesting trees generally breaks down into two methods, clearcutting and partial cutting. Cearcutting, cutting all the trees on an area, is the ugliest. However, there are a couple reasons for using this method of timber harvesting: (1) Some species of trees need full sunlight to reestablish and grow, these species need either a fire or clearcutting to perpetuate themselves. Lodgepole pine in the Rocky Mountains and Douglas fir on the west coast are examples. (2) On mountainsides too steep for tractors, logging systems that use cables suspended high above the ground and can lift logs and pull them up steep slopes to a landing without scaring the soil are necessary. These cable logging systems normally operate in clearcuts.

Topping it.

So, what’s so bad about clearcuts, especially if they just imitate a fire in nature? Again, the problem is how clearcuts look, they can get too big to fit the landscape, they can extend to a straight property lines that looks unnatural on a mountainside, and the roads. Roads and straight lines are not natural in a forest and on a mountain, they look terrible. These ill effects can be mitigated with good forestry practices, for example: make clearcuts less than 40 acres; have cutting boundaries follow natural land features, ridges, creeks, etc.; minimize roads and rehabilitate them when logging is done; burn the slash, and replant trees. These practices reestablish a healthy forest, create good wildlife habitat, and are not so visually invasive on the landscape. Even with good harvesting plans and practices, the name “clearcutting” has the stigma of being bad and it has stuck because harvesting a pretty stand of trees results in a period of ugliness.

Partial cutting is a silvicultural system that removes only selected trees and leaves many standing, it can be used with tree species that have intermediate tolerance to shade because the small trees can become established and grow in the partial shade. The problem is, this kind of logging can’t be done on steep ground, the tractors would cause severe soil erosion and it is too dangerous to operate the track or wheel skidding machines on steep ground. It is also more expensive to partial cut an area because it takes significantly more time. The tree fallers have to be careful not to hit standing trees with the one they are falling and the big machines dragging logs from the woods have to be careful not to damage the trees left standing, in other words, the logging takes skill and care, but where partial cutting can be used the result can soon be a more attractive forest than existed before the logging.