Clear Cutting - An Environmental Disaster

-- Jordan Swerid
April 29, 2010

Clear-cutting forests is by far one of the most controversial timber harvesting techniques in the northern hemisphere. For more than a century now, changes in the northern New England tree harvesting companies have become vast and many people have been left scratching their heads. However, since the beginning of the 1970’s, clear-cutting forests has become both a very successful way for tree-harvesting businesses to make money fast and also cause an environmental disaster.
There are many reasons why clear cutting forests should not be taking place. Some of these include: (1)Clear cutting can cause unstable soil cohesion resulting in mass landslides. (2)Clear cutting without replanting seeds to help re-grow forests is terrible for the environment (includes animal people, etc.). (3)The largest argument about clear cutting is that the rate of time it takes to clear cut an area versus the rate of re-growth is at such a decreasing rate, it takes forests too long to re-grow. (4)Also, by losing trees, it causes us to breathe in less clean air. The only real reason why we do clear-cut forests is because we are living in an era with rapid population increase and we are confined to using up more resources. We also look for projects that can get money fast and efficiently.
Numbers in different areas of North America support the argument. In Nova Scotia, Canada, nearly two square kilometers of forests were clear cut every day. Also, clear cutting accounted for 98.9 % of forest area harvested in Nova Scotia in 1997 and 1998. However, in the United States, there has been some good news. Trees in the U.S. are growing 2–4 times as fast as their long-term norm. Smithsonian researchers measured a series of forest plots at different stages of growth from 5 to 225 years of age. They found that more than 90 percent of the trees grew 2-4 times faster over the past 20 years than predicted from baseline growth rates. This is all great news, but as reported before, clear-cutting is a swift process. Trees get cut down in a matter of seconds. Even if a tree were to grow back to its original size in twenty years (which would be extremely fast), that’s twenty years of treeless or barely treed land.
The last major impact that clear cutting has on the environment is one that is talked about so much now in the present. It is of course, Global Warming. Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of Earth's near-surface air and oceans since the mid-20th century and its projected continuation. If clear cutting continues, the risk of global warming having a higher impact on the earth will continue. It’s an ongoing cycle that needs to be put to a stop soon.
Clear cutting is a major factor in the timber industry today. For us to just completely "clear cut" it from our way of collecting timber is not possible. We need to find a more productive way so we can save our environment before we hit a spot that we can not come back from. Globally, clear cutting is a major issue to every person here on our earth.


Sites Used:
http://www.clearcutnovascotia.ca/stats.htm
http://www.cfact.org/a/1725/Why-are-US-trees-growing-faster