Logging and the Cycle of Nature
When we clearcut the big old trees of the rainforest and knock down all the snags, when we haul away the timber, when we burn downed logs, when we spray herbicides on the nitrogen-fixing alder and salmonberry, when we don't allow the plantations at least several hundred years to evolve into old-growth forests - we systematically arrest the natural development of the rainforest.
As the thousand-year-old forest soils are used up and not replenished, we eliminate the possibility that the temperate rainforest as we know it will ever grow back at all.
Nevertheless, forest companies argue that large-scale industrial clearcut logging roughly replicates natural disaster, especially wild fire, and is therefore a reasonable and natural extension of the perpetual dynamic of forest loss and renewal. But in the west coast rainforest major fires may occur only once every 300 to 1,500 years. The last ice age ended about 11,000 years ago.
If the forest industry were really willing to replicate the cycles of nature, there would be no controversy.
