The theory!

So, the crux of this whole ecological forestry shebang lies around the concept that logging a forest or in other words "killing trees" will actually make it a better forest. So right off the bat we are not talking about clear felling a forest (A process where every tree is an area is felled) In the past people who wanted to avoid clear felling used a technique known as "selective logging". The principle being that you select individual trees and only remove those, leaving the rest to continue growing.

What's wrong with that?

Well the trouble is that to make money out of this you need to take the biggest and the best. These are the healthiest trees, the ones with the best DNA, the fastest growers and the straightest ones. So you do this again and again and again for 100 years and what you are left with is a forest of bent, diseased, slow growing trees. Unfortunately this is where a lot of farm forests and state forests (in NSW at least) are at.

 

In the picture above you literally can't see the forest for the trees! Scary thing is those trees could be 30+ years old. What happened? Well on top of the problem outlined above, at some point someone got a little too excited with the chainsaw. When a tree falls (which is quite a natural occurrence in a forest) it creates competition for the light that is created on the canopy floor, so in a natural forest this would be "patchy"(Something that happens here and there). In an over harvested forest it happens everywhere and competition for light becomes the norm. Eucalypts, (the dominant tree in most Australian forests) have a particular aversion to sharing. They don't like their crowns (tops of the tree) to touch and if they do they stop growing.  You are left with thin and bent trees that will never grow.

So in the picture above without intervention these trees might lay dormant for the next 50 years. they will never achieve their full potential and will never be a home for birds, mammals and reptiles.

The tree below didn't need to fight for light, it won the race to the top of the canopy and in all likelihood will have a couple of hundred years of life left, at some point it will develop hollows in its trunk and will house all kinds of animal life. Trouble is a tree like this is the perfect tree for a timber mill. It's straight, it's branches begin high in the tree so there is lots of timber that can be used. No matter the end product this tree is the one that makes a guy with a chainsaw go "you beauty!" 

So the health of a forest is not measured in how many trees there are but the quality of the trees that remain and forests that have been logged in the past if treated in the right way can actually do better. Removing some of the competition for those healthy trees to thrive will allow for a better looking forest, with less weeds, more wildlife and bigger, taller, older trees.

So the whole point of all of that is to say that logging bans and locking up forests in nature reserves isn't always the best outcome for a forest. It's often better than many of the alternatives but we can learn to use forests effectively for human needs if we have a bit of respect and a bit of knowledge on what they really are.