agesilaus wrote:
Supposedly the original forests on the continent were such that settlers could drive their teams and wagons easily in between trees.
You must be thinking of forests back east. They were heavily managed by native people, including periodic prescribed burns, selecting for nutbearing trees, etc. That open, parklike atmosphere was not natural.
In the PNW coast range, which we were just discussing, settler wagons were limited to traveling one mile per day. It took a group all day to clear 1 mile of forest in a path wide enough for a wagon.
Tom/Barb wrote:
Little known fact: When clear cutting is done a certain amount of slash must be left on the ground to protect from erosion. And the law requires the area be replanted with in 4 years.
Those laws were pushed through by environmentalists relatively recently. Most of the west was clearcut with no requirement for replanting, and slash was burned.
Now that most of the western forests have been clearcut multiple times, it is very difficult to find any soil in which to replant the trees. I worked in reforestation and have much experience with this. There's a lot of bare exposed rock that used to be forest.
dieseltruckdriver wrote:
Anyone who has been to the Black Hills might find it hard to believe that nearly the entire forest has been logged, but but it has, responsibly.
The news releases some organizations put out would try to convince people that logging means clear cutting, but that isn't normally the case.
In the PNW, which we are discussing, clearcutting is the norm. In other regions, it is not.
