In East Texas,
clearcutting mania in the early days gave little consideration to the acreage being cut.
Clearcutting has been practiced in California since the 1950s.
It does what few others have attempted: it combines a critique of
clearcutting with an analysis of labour practices.
A permit was required for
clearcutting and could be granted to harvest a plantation, for a variety of silvicultural purposes or to improve or create wildlife habitat with a plan by a certified wildlife professional.
In general, young plants have not been recruited into plantations since the date of
clearcutting. Individuals found in plantations were as old as 72 yr.
It's this insensitivity that
Clearcutting seeks to penetrate by turning industrial forestry from an abstract issue to a visceral one.
Species diversity, resulting from successional change at Site 1, peaked the third year following
clearcutting and then subsided for the remainder of the nine-year period (Fig.
The recently approved Forest Plan points out that
clearcutting is NOT the predominant harvest method.
But SPI's
clearcutting rampage is provoking resistance among communities up and down the Sierra Nevada range.
Because the layer of litter on the forest floor intercepts rainfall in much the same manner as the canopy (Rowe 1955; Singer and Blackard 1978; Helvey and Patric 1965; Johnson 1940; Lowermilk 1930), litter removal, as a result of
clearcutting, can greatly modify the raindrop impact and the quantity of water infiltrating the soil or moving downslope.
In the early 1960s
clearcutting became the dominant method of timber harvest and regeneration, resulting in greatly increased woody browse production (Moore and Downing, 1966).
Though grazing land indeed releases large amounts of trace gases after
clearcutting, these emissions dwindle to levels below those of forest soil about 10 years later, says Michael Keller.
