Understanding Timber Harvesting

Throughout our lives, most of us have been inundated with negative information about logging – close your eyes and you can probably picture big clear cuts, mudslides and more scenes of environmental devastation. However, modern forest management is worlds apart from the logging that most people have been exposed to. Done well, modern forest management, through the harvesting of trees, can be restorative and regenerative, helping create more diverse, vibrant, resilient forests with better wildlife habitat, helping forests recover from the effects of human land use and restoring old-growth attributes sooner than they would naturally occur. At the same time, forest management generates local, renewable resources which get turned into building materials, paper, power and more. Like local food, local wood is an asset in that it supports our working landscape and our rural communities and mitigates the transportation and use of resources, produced under potentially more adverse ecological and social conditions, from elsewhere in the country or the world.