Word: cuttingly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Forest Service had vastly overestimated the amount of old growth -- virgin forest -- still left in the Northwest. Traditionally, the Forest Service has disapproved of messy, tangled old-growth forests, whose dank, rotting understory and ancient trees it has referred to as "overmature" and "decadent." It has preferred to clear-cut the old growth, and then treat trees as if they were very large soybean plants that could be "harvested" for timber on a rotation basis every 60 or 80 or 100 years in "sustained-yield" areas...
Most of them, it turned out, had already been sold, clear-cut and trucked off. In six national forests in Oregon and Washington, they found that only about 33% to 50% of the sample tracts listed as old growth were still forested. "Several years of clear-cutting simply are not accounted for," says Morrison. In the Olympic National Forest below us, only 106,000 acres remain of the 217,000 claimed by the Forest Service. In Oregon's Siskiyou, 142,000 acres remain of a claimed 433,000. Much of what was still uncut was broken into tracts too small...
...touch down on a rough landing strip on Forest Service land near Mount Rainier National Park. There is a campground nearby, and a tract of huge trees, each about 12 ft. or 15 ft. in diameter and 175 ft. or more high, reserved from cutting to show visitors what the forest used to be like. Old logging roads lace through this damp, shaded museum tract. Huge stumps rot here and there among the living trees. These are significant: it is obvious that a sizable number of trees can be cut without killing the forest. Saplings and a complex tangle...
Such selective cutting, however, which allowed forests to regenerate species that had no commercial value as well as the highly prized Douglas fir, seemed too inefficient to the Government foresters. Now, perhaps too late, research has shown that clear-cuts tend to break an important ecological chain: they destroy the habitat of small mammals that shelter in forest undergrowth. These creatures eat and distribute mycorrhizal fungi, which grow among the rootlets of saplings and help the trees absorb water and nutrients. There may be enough spores of fungi in the soil after a clear-cut to start a second-growth...
...first Yasser Arafat refused to speak with journalists. When he finally granted an interview to the Saudi Arabian newspaper Asharq al Awsat, a bile of irritation coated his words. He was never consulted before King Hussein cut Jordan's links with the West Bank last month, he complained. Yet that move dumped into his lap the responsibility for administering the occupied territory and for trying to recover it from Israel...