More than ninety percent of the original forest in the American Northwest has been clearcut at least once. The large stumps in these pictures are remnants of an ancient woods where trees commonly grew to be five hundred or more years old. The small stumps are what is left of a recently “harvested” monoculture, an industrial forest sustained by artificial fertilizers and selective herbicides and cut in its infancy.

Will this practice eventually exhaust the soil and end in permanent deforestation? There are numerous areas in the world where this has happened, among them parts of China, a country that has recently banned clearcutting. Efforts to restrict clearcutting in the American Northwest have, however, mostly failed.