Clearcut: The Tragedy of Industrial Forestry.

• Author: Ayres, Ed

At first glance, this rather large book concerns a fairly narrow topic--just one more ecological outrage among many, to compete for our already strained attention along with chlorine bleaching, coal burning, and tiger hunting. Do we have time to think about this? And, anyway, isn't clearcutting being phased out?

But no, this is not a narrow topic. It's more like the narrow end of a telescope, that opens the eyes to an enormity we hadn't been quite aware of. And clearcutting, like malaria and the subjugation of Indians, is not a thing of the past--it's globally pervasive, rapacious, and rapidly spreading in the 1990s. It's just well-hidden from observation--by "beauty strips" along rural roads, and by the lack of any easy access to the rugged tracts where it is being done.

In his introduction, editor Bill Devall--author of the 1985 book Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered--notes that clearcutting has often been compared to rape, or even to war. Like rape, it is a sociopathic violation; one of the abiding themes of the book is that healthy humans have a deep spiritual connection to the environment that produced us, and to lose that is to become inhuman. And, like war, the decimation of forests is destruction on a scale that permanently alters the course of the earth's biological history. As wilderness advocate Dave Foreman commented on the eve of the book's publication, continuing this practice could undermine evolution itself.

Clearcut is full of photographs, in which the rape/war comparisons seem apt enough. But when I saw a blowup of one of these photos on the night the book was released, for an instant I saw something different. I have spent a lot of time in forests, from the Apennines to the Sierras, and have always been aware of the forest as a presence; it's always breathing. When I saw this photo, it was as if I'd stumbled on the scene of a mutilation--the kind where someone was compelled not only to kill, but to debase and humiliate as well. Maybe it's a logical outcome of the Western idea of "subjugating" nature, but it took only a slight refocusing of the eyes to see this as a desecration.

One need not be opposed to all cutting of trees (or even to fairly large-scale cutting of trees) to be alarmed at what clearcutting does. It's one thing to utilize trees for human needs; it's another to raze the ecosystem so completely that everything in it is obliterated--not just live trees, but dead trees that provide soil for the...