Timber Harvesting and Roads

Forest ecosystems provide a broad and ever-expanding number of goods, services, and values. One such good is wood that is harvested for human use. This section is a synthesis of knowledge about timber harvesting and forest roads.

Cutting timber serves a dual purpose. The obvious one is the economic value of the harvested for wood. Not so obvious is that harvesting is the major means by which forest ecosystems can be managed. It is through harvesting activities that forest managers can regenerate new forests, improve existing forests, and alter the composition and structure of forests to attain any number of objectives, many of which are not related to timber.

Many people in the developed countries of the world do not want any trees cut at all. The increasing prosperity and greater urbanization of the American public has changed peoples principal concerns from the supplying of economic wants to putting a greater emphasis on the nonconsumptive uses of forest ecosystems (Caldwell and others 1994). However, this position is logically untenable. Urbanization obscures the human reliance on consumptive uses of natural resources (Fautin 1995). Wood-framed single-family homes, toilet paper, wooden furniture and cardboard boxes were all made from trees that were cut in a forest somewhere. Some people seem to have lost the understanding that the two are fundamentally connected (Dekker-Robertson 1997). Without a decrease in human consumption of wood products, cutting timber for wood has to continue. The only questions are where and how (Rauscher 1999).

Deciding to reduce resource production by protecting and preserving North American forest ecosystems without simultaneously reducing wood consumption rates means that other areas of the world will be taxed to make up the difference (Moir and Mowrer 1994). We have effectively exported our demand for wood to other countries forest ecosystems that may very well be less resilient than our own. The only other way to decrease wood production without decreasing demand is through scientific and technological advances (Dekker-Robertson 1997). Advances in resource management can provide more wood and advances in utilization can satisfy more demand per unit of standing timber (Rauscher 1999).