Comment by Nicholas_C
6 hours ago
From an ecological standpoint how is logging different than a naturally occurring forest fire? Or perhaps the forest fires never get strong enough to burn the old growth trees since they would happen more frequently via lightning strikes or natives clearing the brush/hunting?
Forest fires don't replace America's forests with ecologically dead pasture, for one. Forest fires don't usually strip out the roots preventing the erosion, and they naturally lead to succession from plants which opportunize these events. There are even entire bird species which are dependent on these reliable forest fires like Kirtland's Warbler. The real issue is the scale. 99% of America's old growth forest was logged, and much of it was replaced with farm and pasture. We could more effectively encourage mass rewilding if we had collective action to rewild pasture and replace the lost nutrition with plant foods, which require a dramatically smaller land and water footprint.
Exactly, forest fires usually don't kill most of the trees in an old growth forest. The trees are much bigger, hold a lot more water, and have much thicker fire-resistant bark. This is why you usually see charred parts on the bottom of living old growth trees - they survived fire.
Because the old growth was logged, the fires we have now are often able to kill 100% of the trees in an area because the trees are all small and young and vulnerable. And this is self perpetuating, because after such a fire the soil often erodes, and sun hits the ground directly keeping it dry - it takes a really long time to recover from in some places.
Each cycle of logging removes even more soil and makes the landscape drier, and resets the timer on how long it will be before the forest is able to survive a wildfire. It's a short term thing.
I'm not saying no one should ever cut a tree or use wood - and it can be done in better and worse ways, it's really complex. But in general, the repeated clearcutting of the pacific northwest is steadily degrading that landscape the same way repeated intensive till farming of the prairies is degrading that landscape - it's a relatively short term thing with diminishing returns.