Making the Case: For and Against Clearfelling

In unprotected eucalyptus groves, anything goes. You own the land, you do what you please—such is life in the logging industry. However, although certain forests must go without a World Heritage halo to shield them from commercial harvest, the conundrum persists: should we be clearfelling?

The evidence for the efficiency of clearfelling is certainly there: it’s one and done. The method involves combing through acres of eucalypt with heavy machinery to strip and chop apart the mature trees. After the hack job is complete, controlled burns slowly turn the forests into ash, releasing the trees’ seedpods in the process. The saplings take root, swaddled by the nutrient-rich soil, repopulating the ground and restarting the typical 90-year cycle.

It sounds quite idyllic—natural, almost. The groves are burned as if in a naturally occurring wildfire, the seedbed is fertilized and ready for new growth, and the whole process is ensured to be cyclical.

In reality, clearfelling is much less romantic. First, the 90-year cycle can be significantly quicker than the naturally occurring wildfire rates of 100-400 years for mixed Tasmanian forests. Disturbances such as this can cause mixed forests to be changed floristically, resulting in a loss of species and diversity. Additionally, following a slash and burn, heavy smoke can cloud the island on a windless day, and a rapid release of carbon dioxide poses a risk for greenhouse gas build-up.

Thus, the jury is hung. Alternatives include stripfelling, patchfelling, dispersed retention, aggregated retention, and single-tree logging—each of which involve keeping some degree of forest intact, and may better meet objectives for biodiversity, aesthetics and special species timber production.

All that’s left is implementation.

Source: http://bit.ly/19a5KQP

Smoke from a clearfell behind Mount Field