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Your dates are off. Mechanized logging didn’t even commence until the 1940s — I think the first cat was like 1945. See the graphic on page 7 of the linked artic
by hcurtiss 4y ago
Your dates are off. Mechanized logging didn’t even commence until the 1940s — I think the first cat was like 1945. See the graphic on page 7 of the linked article showing historic harvest in Oregon (with which I’m most familiar). The east coast was harvested before then (a lot by Gifford Pinchot’s family) but I think the point stands that the trend in the states is toward reforestation, and the article’s calculation of losing the world’s forests is preposterous.
https://www.oregon.gov/odf/Documents/workingforests/oregonstimberharvests.pdf https://www.oregon.gov/odf/Documents/workingforests/oregonst...
- jph 4y agoWhen gold was discovered in northwest California in 1850, speculators crowded the remote redwood region in search of riches and new lives, and companies harvested the trees for booming development. Mechanized logging was widespread there by the early 1900s, such as with steam winches and steam trains, and gang saws and rotary saws. Before the Gold Rush, estimates are redwood forest covered more than 2,000,000 acres of the California coast; today, the area has only 133,000 acres.
- hcurtiss 4y agoYes, steam-powered logging was earlier, and yes there was substantial harvest in northern California prior to 1900. But to say that "most of the old-growth forests gone by the turn of the century" is simply untrue. In Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Colorado, and most of the rest of the West, it had only just begun by that time. The big boom came with the world wars and the introduction of diesel powered machinery.