Some people think of the forest as a finite resource, like a coal mine or an oil well. To them “logging” is almost a dirty word, so I prefer to use a term like “harvesting”, because nobody denies the farmer the right to harvest his crops.

However, the forest is not static, it is dynamic, it regrows. The forests of Sweden have been harvested for more than a thousand years, yet they get more and more productive — see the entry “Sweden” in the book. And much of the “pristine” forest along the Skyline Drive in the Shenandoah National Park in Virginia was farmed in the past, and prairie before that — see “Shenandoah …” in the book.

Logging in a production forest produces wood, jobs, ground vegetation for the fauna, accessibility for walkers and fire fighters; it reduces the fire load, removes dead and dying trees, keeps the best trees so that they can regenerate the stand, and increases CO2 absorption. — I’ll write a blog entry on that soon.

So don’t knock logging!

Mikael Grut, 29.9.2014