About Clearcutting and Impacts of Industrial Logging
- What is clearcutting?
- What's wrong with clearcutting?
- How much clearcutting is happening?
- Where is clearcutting happening now?
- Who is clearcutting?
- Are there alternative loggin methods?
- Who uses selection logging?
- Summary and conclusion
What is clearcutting?
Clearcutting is an extreme logging method in which resilient natural forests are harvested and replaced with man-made, monoculture tree plantations that do not replicate the ecosystem services of a healthy forest. Since 1997, over 1 million acres in California have been decimated by clearcutting and related logging practices.
At the current rate, more than 50,000 acres of California forest are being clearcut every year, and, in the wake of extensive so-called “thinning” of forests overthe past few years, often without regulatory oversight, it is likely to be far more.
After logging, most clearcut sites are bulldozed, and herbicide is applied to strip away any remaining saplings, bushes, and other plants that may compete with the conifer seedlings that start the man-made plantation. This living flora, which is treated as debris and called “slash,” is always piled and sometimes burned. What remains is a moonscape that disrupts the natural forest ecosystem.
Clearcutting is the most destructive form of even-aged logging. In other even-aged management methods, loggers may leave one or two seed trees to drop pine cones and help restock the area. Another approach involves removing some trees initially and cutting down the remaining ones later. However, in all forms of even-aged logging, timber companies ultimately remove all trees and clear the land to plant conifer seedlings, resulting in an even-aged plantation rather than a biodiverse forest with a variety of species and ages.
Photo by Shyam Tala on Unsplash
What’s wrong with clearcutting?
Healthy and biodiverse forests provide essential ecosystem services that benefit both people and wildlife. They sequester carbon, which helps stabilize our climate. Forests also filter our air and water and serve as crucial habitats for numerous animal species. Moreover, forests are vital to our economy. For instance, crop pollinators, such as forest-dwelling birds and butterflies, often forage in nearby agricultural fields, transferring pollen between crop flowers and boosting yields. Crop pollination declines with increasing distance from forests due to reduced pollinator activity. Additionally, forests provide healthy, fertile soil, wood for wood products, and opportunities for tourism and recreation. To ensure that our communities and future generations can continue to enjoy these benefits, it is crucial to manage our forests sustainably.
Clearcutting destroys our forests and harms all Californians by:
- Increasing wildfire danger
- Accelerating climate change
- Degrading our waters
- Threatening wildlife
- Magnifying environmental injustice
- Undermining community vitality
Read the sections below to find out how clearcutting jeopardizes these many gifts from nature.
Clearcuts across the Sierra Nevada Mountains/Courtesy of Ebbets Pass Forest Watch
Increases Wildfire Danger
After a clearcut, planting trees of the same age and species results in a forest that burns hotter and faster than the diverse forests they replace.
Timber companies and lobbyists will sometimes claim that clearcutting land reduces fuel for wildfires – but it’s not true. Instead, they remove mature trees that could resist fire and slow the wind that spreads embers and ignites communities, and leave behind highly flammable plantations.
Studies on forest fires have demonstrated that in even-aged tree plantations, fires can burn with greater intensity and speed. Young trees burn more easily than old trees, and after an area is clearcut, the first natural vegetation to grow in is often highly flammable shrubbery. 1
“Clearcutting can cause rapid regeneration of shrubs and trees that can create highly flammable fuel conditions within a few years of cutting.” - US Forest Service; US Department of Interior
Not only do plantations increase the severity of wildfires, but the clearcut itself increases the risk of fire. The loss of adequate tree canopy cover exposes the land to increased sunlight, making it hotter and drier. Hotter, drier air from clearcuts can raise temperatures and reduce humidity in adjacent forest areas, creating a significant fire hazard.
Considering how the climate crisis creates hotter and drier environmental conditions across California and continues to drive more severe wildfire disasters, we must make every effort to mitigate fire danger, and clearcutting poses a massive and unnecessary wildfire risk.
Photo by Landon Parenteau on Unsplash
As home-owners are being asked to change where they build, use non-flammable building materials, and maintain 100 feet of defensible space around their homes, shouldn’t the powerful timber industry take some responsibility for not putting the public and other forest owners at risk?
Accelerates Climate Change
Clearcutting releases carbon stored by older trees and replaces them with seedlings that have little ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. To reverse climate change, we must both release less greenhouse gas and store more carbon.
Clearcutting releases more carbon dioxide (CO2) than any other form of logging, and clearcut areas will not sequester more CO2 than they release for two decades.
This is true even with a plantation of trees replacing the clearcut mature forest, as young plantation trees have little ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere compared to the original forest.
“Forests are the only carbon capture and storage ‘technology’ we have in our grasp that is safe, proven, inexpensive, immediately available at scale, and capable of providing beneficial ripple effects, from regulating rainfall patterns to providing livelihoods to indigenous communities.” - Alessandro Baccini, Senior Scientist, Woods Hole Research Center.
Large amounts of carbon are also stored in forest soils and roots; that carbon is released into the atmosphere during clearcutting operations. Alternative logging methods would produce significantly fewer emissions.
Logging advocates sometimes argue that when you clearcut old, mature trees and convert them into lumber, the sequestered carbon is retained in the wood products. Only a small fraction of the carbon stored in standing trees is ultimately retained in long‑lived harvested wood products. Most carbon is released back to the atmosphere during harvesting, slash decomposition, milling losses, manufacturing, and short‑lived product use. Peer‑reviewed studies and international assessments show that, on average, 10–25% of the original tree carbon ends up in long‑lived wood products, with the remainder lost within years to decades through processing waste, bioenergy use, and product decay.
They may also say that mature trees don’t grow at a swift rate, and therefore don’t take very much CO2 out of the atmosphere, while seedlings grow very fast and have a much higher CO2 removal rate than old trees. These are myths; recent studies have proven that irresponsible logging practices and forest degradation are turning our forests into carbon emitters rather than the carbon sinks we need to fight climate change.
Healthy forests are critical carbon storage centers that annually remove 33% of the amount of CO2 emitted from fossil fuel combustion. Moreover, a 2020 study found that the potential for forests to accumulate carbon has likely been underestimated by 32% - meaning our forests are even more critical for fighting the climate crisis than we give them credit for!
Clearcutting not only releases carbon into our atmosphere, but it also reduces the forest’s ability to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the future.
Degrades Our Waters
Clearcutting leads to erosion, landslides, and contamination of our water supply by sediment and toxic herbicides used in the process. It also compacts the ground, reducing the soil's ability to retain water and ultimately decreasing our supply of clean water.
California forests supply 75% of our water - and clearcutting is putting that supply in jeopardy.
Photo by Alfred Kenneally on Unsplash
Clearcutting compacts the ground and decreases the soil’s ability to retain water, leading to drought in some areas and flooding in others. This ultimately reduces our supply of clean water.
Furthermore, we depend heavily on the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which provides nearly two-thirds of our state’s water needs, especially during the summer months. As the climate continues to warm and dry, the snow melts earlier and faster, depleting the water reserves “stored” as ice and snow.
Clearcutting worsens this issue by removing trees that provide essential shade, raising temperatures, and accelerating snowmelt. As the climate continues to change, it is crucial that we not lose the valuable temperature-moderating services our forests provide. These forests play a vital role in maintaining the snowpack we depend on for our year-round water supply.
Clearcutting and the logging roads created to service clearcuts can increase sediment erosion into creeks and rivers, cloud water, reduce water quality, and threaten fish species and their habitats. A recent study showed that the amount of sediment in water is directly correlated with the percentage of land clearcut - that is, the more clearcutting there is, the more sediment pollution there is.5
Toxic herbicides used in clearcutting and tree plantations, and other harmful runoff, can also make their way into our watersheds and fisheries, further polluting waters that healthy forests help keep clean.
Further, some claim that logging increases water supplies because streams often rise right after trees are removed. That short‑term bump is real, but it’s temporary. Forests don’t just use water — they help create it. Through evapotranspiration, trees release moisture that forms clouds and contributes to rainfall. When forests are cut, that atmospheric moisture source disappears, and regional rainfall declines. Soils also dry out faster without shade and roots, and water runs off quickly instead of soaking in, leaving streams with unstable, low flows over time. In the long run, logging reduces water, not increases it, because it dismantles the natural system that forests use to generate and regulate water.
Threatens Wildlife
Clearcutting reduces biodiversity. Because clearcutting indiscriminately destroys entire areas, plant loss and destruction of animal habitat are unavoidable. Further environmental stress is put on many already endangered species that call the forest home.
Deforestation is the leading cause of biodiversity loss globally. While clearcutting is not technically classified as deforestation, it certainly is a significant form of forest degradation, to the point of significantly endangering this critical biodiversity. John Talberth, Ph.D., of the Center for Sustainable Economy, describes clearcutting as “rotating sources of deforestation.”
Because clearcutting indiscriminately destroys entire areas, plant loss and destruction of animal habitat are unavoidable. Species that need particular conditions to survive may even go extinct due to the dramatic landscape change caused by a clearcut.
Photo by Ali Kazal on Unsplash
Hotter and drier conditions caused by clearcutting and the subsequent loss of tree cover, as well as related soil disturbances, hurt native plants, as do the herbicides logging companies use to keep native plants from returning. The loss of habitat also increases competition for resources, putting undue pressure on our wildlife.
What’s more, clearcutting often introduces new logging roads that cut through the ecosystem and decrease the habitat connectivity that is crucial for many species.
More than 30% of all plant and vertebrate species in the entire US live in California. There are more than 1,000 vertebrate species - including spotted owls, beavers, and coho salmon - that live here, and 65% of those species only live in California!
California is also home to more than 6,500 plant species, 2,000 of which are endemic, and over 30,000 insect species, including 1,600 native bees.
Wildlife is critical for healthy ecosystems, economies, and human communities - and yet more than 30% of California’s species are threatened with extinction. To protect these species, we must stop clearcutting.
Magnifies Environmental Injustice
Clearcutting amplifies the adverse environmental and health conditions that already disproportionately affect Indigenous Peoples and other persons of color.
Pollution-generating biomass incinerators and wood pellet production factories are generally located near low income and indigenous communities that have often faced a history of environmental injustice.
For instance, in the southeastern US, a Dogwood Alliance study found that wood pellet production facilities are 50% more likely to be located in counties where the poverty level is above the state median, and at least 25% of the population is nonwhite. Meanwhile, in North Carolina, the Rachel Carson Council found that Enviva, the largest wood pellet producer globally, had operational locations disproportionately clustered around poor communities of color.
Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash
Both the biomass incineration and wood pellet production industries are, in large part, fueled by clearcutting debris and possibly the trees themselves. These incinerators and factories create significant health issues. While limited studies have been done in California, there is a clear pattern of pollution-generating industries that are supplied by clearcutting operating in locations that disproportionately affect low-income communities, people of color, and Indigenous Peoples.
We know clearcutting is harmful for local communities, by degrading forests, increasing wildfire risk, reducing tourism revenue, destabilizing water supplies, and creating boom‑and‑bust timber cycles. While it may produce short‑term profits for timber companies, the long‑term economic costs are borne by those who already face a history of environmental and social injustice - from unfair proximity to environmental hazards, to the myriad of social inequities stemming from redlining.
Undermines Community Vitality for Future Generations
People enjoy recreational activities in healthy forests with abundant wildlife, plants, and scenic beauty. Sustaining healthy forests also means maintaining sustainable jobs and forest resources that can directly or indirectly impact local economies. Clearcutting jeopardizes robust, sustainable economies and deprives future generations of the benefits that vibrant ecosystems and communities provide today.
Outdoor recreation now delivers far more economic value to rural communities than logging. Natural, healthy forests in California sustain thousands of jobs in the recreation, boating, fishing, and hunting industries, as well as in the sustainable forestry industry.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, the outdoor recreation economy generates $1.2 trillion in national economic output and supports 5 million jobs, making it a major driver of rural development. Federal agencies such as the USDA and EPA emphasize that recreation strengthens rural main streets, supports small businesses, and provides long‑term, diversified economic growth.
Photo by Andrei Cotofrei on Unsplash
On the other hand, logging has taken a serious toll on California’s fisheries by filling streams with sediment and raising water temperatures—two changes that make rivers far less suitable for spawning. When hillsides are logged, soil washes into streams, clogging the gravel beds where salmon and trout lay their eggs. This sediment blocks oxygen flow and suffocates developing embryos. At the same time, removing the forest canopy exposes streams to direct sunlight, causing water temperatures to rise beyond what young salmonids can tolerate. Warmer water also holds less oxygen, further stressing fish. Together, these impacts reduce spawning success, shrink fish populations, and ultimately harm the commercial and recreational fishing industries that depend on healthy, cold, clear rivers.
Clearcutting has also harmed hunting in California by degrading the very habitats game species depend on. When large forest areas are cut at once, the loss of canopy, mast‑producing trees, and protective cover reduces food and shelter for deer, bears, turkeys, and other wildlife. Although fresh clearcuts may briefly produce new shrubs and grasses, this benefit fades quickly as dense, even‑aged plantations grow in—habitat that offers little forage or cover for most game. Clearcutting also increases erosion and wildfire severity, both of which further damage the diverse, mixed‑age forests that support healthy wildlife populations. As game numbers decline, hunters see fewer animals, success rates drop, and rural communities that rely on hunting‑related spending feel the economic loss.
How much clearcutting is happening?
From 1997 to 2018, over 1 million acres were logged in California using clearcutting or other even-aged management methods. Another 1 million acres were logged using selection logging or some other form of uneven-aged logging.
Figure 1. Total acres logged in California in the past 20 years, with clearcutting and other even-aged management practices tracked in red.
Where is clearcutting happening now?
Figure 2. Top ten counties in California that experience the most clearcutting and other even-aged management practices, with Siskiyou, Humboldt, and Shasta counties subjected to the most.
In California, clearcutting is no longer generally practiced on US Forest Service (public) lands. However, California forestry laws and rules still allow clearcutting on private lands except for in Marin, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, and San Mateo Counties.
Clearcutting projects must be approved by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (CAL FIRE) via the Timber Harvest Plan approval process. Timber Harvest Plans that include clearcutting and other forms of even-aged management are often opposed by local communities, but are rarely rejected.
Because plans must be approved, we have complete records of where clearcutting happens across California. The counties most affected are Siskiyou, Humboldt, Shasta, Trinity, and Tehama. In Trinity County alone, 85% of logging is even-aged management, and in the last 20 years, more than 100,000 acres have been cut with this destructive method.
Who is clearcutting?
The two largest timber companies in California – Sierra Pacific Industries and Green Diamond Resource Company – collectively own nearly 2.5 million acres of California’s forestlands. Though some of these companies’ timberlands are managed to certifiable sustainability standards, they routinely clearcut significant portions of their forests to maximize profits.
Figure 3. Total acres logged in California across timber companies in the past 20 years, with clearcutting and other forms of even-aged management highlighted in blue. Sierra Pacific Industries and its partners are the biggest culprits, harvesting a massive total of approximately 350,000 acres.
Sierra Pacific Industries (SPI) is a privately owned company and is the single largest landowner in California with 2 million acres, mainly in the Sierra Nevada but also in coastal redwood forests – more than half of the industrial timber industry’s 2,982,000 acres in California.
SPI began widespread clearcutting around 2000 and is well underway to clearcut and convert approximately 1.2 million acres of natural forests into tree plantations. SPI states that it adheres to the Sustainable Forestry Initiative® (SFI®) Standard, but this is an industry-created program that most environmental groups do not consider to be adequate, especially compared to the certification program of the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an independent, non-governmental non-profit organization established to promote the responsible management of the world’s forests.
Green Diamond owns around 400,000 acres of forested lands on the north coast of California in Humboldt and Del Norte Counties. These private lands surround Redwood National and State Parks, the Yurok Reservation, and the communities around Humboldt Bay, Trinidad, Klamath, and Crescent City. In California, some of Green Diamond Resource Company's lands have achieved either SFI certification or FSC certification, but they continue to use extensive clearcutting.
Roseburg Resources Company owns approximately 650,000 acres in Western Oregon and Northern California, including Lassen, Modoc, Plumas, Shasta, Siskiyou, and Trinity Counties.
Non-industrial private landowners collectively hold another 4,455,000 acres of timberland.
Are there alternative logging methods?
Other logging methods are less destructive to forests and the ecological services they provide us. For instance, selection logging involves removing some trees and leaving others behind so that the area remains forested, thereby reducing disturbance to carbon sequestration, water purification and production, vulnerability to fire, and wildlife habitat. A selectively logged forest naturally reseeds itself, and the trees vary in age and species.
Another form is group selection, which involves removing trees and vegetation from an area up to 2.5 acres.
Who uses selection logging?
Some companies prefer selection logging and other forms of uneven-aged management. In fact, they are the only forms of logging that are legal in Marin, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, and Santa Clara Counties. Selection logging is financially viable and usually the only logging certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. You can search for FSC certification for individuals and private timber companies on its.
Many timber companies are embracing the benefits of sustainable logging:
Mendocino Redwoods Company’s stated purpose has been to demonstrate that forestlands can be managed productively with a high standard of environmental stewardship. After years of aggressive harvesting on more than 228,800 acres that included extensive clearcutting, the company’s goal is to restore its property to a selectively harvested forest of mostly Redwood and Douglas Fir. Stewardship objectives include measurable improvements in aquatic and upslope habitat, old growth protection, clean water, and community well-being, in addition to producing long-term sustainable timber supplies.
Humboldt Redwood Company is modeling its operations on what has worked well for Mendocino Redwood Company over the past 12 years. Within the first week of operation, Humboldt Redwood Company began converting Timber Harvesting Plan (THP) units approved for clearcutting under the previous owner into selection-harvest units on its 209,300 acres. Both companies have a policy of open and transparent operations, and are willing to take interested members of the public anywhere on their forestlands. Humboldt Redwood Company has eliminated clearcutting and received certification from the Forest Stewardship Council. The company is significantly reducing herbicide use, protecting old-growth trees, and focusing more on habitat conservation.
Collins Pine is a privately-owned family company with approximately 94,000 acres of softwood in northeastern California. All three Collins forests—307,000 total acres in Pennsylvania, Almanor, and Lakeview—have been independently certified by SCS Global Services in accordance with the standards and policies of the Forest Stewardship Council. Collins timberlands are biodiverse, multi-layered, canopied forests, not single-species tree plantations. The Collins Company believes that third-party, independent certification of its forestland is the best way to protect the legacy of the total forest ecosystem.
Big Creek Lumber, in the Santa Cruz Mountains, is often held up as a counter‑example to the industrial clearcutting model because it has spent decades practicing selective, uneven‑aged forestry in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Their approach is unusual in California’s private timber sector, and it has shaped both the landscape and the company’s reputation.
Summary and Conclusion
Clearcutting destroys our forests and harms all Californians by:
- Increasing wildfire danger
- Accelerating climate change
- Degrading our waters
- Threatening wildlife
- Magnifying environmental injustice
Together, we can and must stop this destructive practice.
For more Resources on Clearcutting and the Impacts of Logging, click here (link to appropriate resources section.)
1US Forest Service; US Department of Interior. National Fire Plan. A report to the President in response to the wildfires of 2000, Sept. 8, 2000: managing the impact of wildfires on communities and the environment.
3Harris 2016 USFS
4 Cook-Patton et al 2020