Critics say that clear-cutting—the idea that forests should be logged to keep them young so wildlife can thrive—is based on flawed science
Coming upon a clear-cut in an old forest is a jolting experience. Trees large and small are collapsed one atop the other in tangled jackstraw piles, corpse-like amid ragged stumps, and the ground is rutted with the tracks of heavy machinery. Such was the scene on the August daylast year when forest activist Zack Porter and I hiked a newly built logging road in the Pittenden Inventoried Roadless Area, part of Vermont’s 400,000-acre Green Mountain National Forest.
The practice is how the Forest Service justifies its approved commercial timber sales in the Pittenden and seven other formerly roadless areas in Green Mountain National Forest, where loggers are now opening roads and clear-cutting some 15,000 acres of trees. “A lot of people don't like logging because they view it as destructive,” says Forest Service wildlife biologist Dave King, who’s one of the agency’s most vocal proponents of cutting to maintain young forests. “I used to be one of those people.”
“What we’re doing here is going into forests that are farthest on their way to producing the clean water, clean air, carbon storage, and biodiversity that we need most from our public lands,” he says as we walk among lovely mixed hardwoods and evergreens that are slated for logging. “We shouldn’t be liquidating them for short-term gain.
Yet according to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which collects population data on bird species in North America, all the birds identified as needing logging for wildlife—except one, the golden-winged warbler—are common, and in little danger, across their ranges. None of the game species—American woodcock, bobwhites, quails, ruffed grouse, and others—are in the least bit endangered; they’re so common in fact that they’re heavily hunted every year.
That Mass Audubon joined arms with the timber industry to defeat the bill shows how fervently the organization believes in the logging-for-wildlife approach to managing forests. Spearheading opposition to H.897, Mass Audubon signed an open letter to legislators urging them not to pass it. “We do not think the best way to maximize the contribution of forests to addressing climate change is to prohibit timber harvest on all state lands,” the letter said.
“Of course, a managed forest can be tailored to the needs of individual species, but that is at the expense of greater biodiversity,” Moomaw says. “Greater biodiversity means not just birds but all species. It means fungi that increase the growth and carbon accumulation by forests, bacteria that build soil carbon, lichens that extract minerals from rocks, and pollinators, including insects.”
“Every day, we work to understand and support the central role forests play in solutions to both the climate change and biodiversity loss crises,” says Michael O’Connor, a spokesperson for Mass Audubon. “If anything, the growing scientific consensus recognizes that habitat heterogeneity, including young forests, is key to long-term forest resilience and to avoiding extirpation of associated species.
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