Quote:
Originally Posted by RWood
...the state of Maine was almost completely devoid of trees as they had all been harvested for paper goods, furniture, ship building, housing, heating material, or cleared for farming.
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I live in the northeast (not in Maine, but quite close to it), and I can tell you that the forests here still have not recovered from the clearcutting you describe. The ratio of hardwood to softwood is entirely different than it was before the arrival of the Europeans, with widespread impacts on the animal populations that depend on the different species of trees and other plant life.
As far as brush clearing goes, on the Eastern seaboard the growth of underbrush itself is largely due to human intervention, according to a very interesting article in National Geographic a couple of months ago. Apparently earthworms are not native to the Americas, and their introduction (largely from the bilge water and plant imports of Europeans) drastically altered the ecosystem. Prior to the introduction of earthworms, leaves and other mast would accrue at the bases of trees, preventing most young growth. Earthworms convert this mast to loam, resulting in the rapid development of undergrowth.
Is the answer to clear brush? In the Northeast and mid-Atlantic states, forest fires are not as common or as fierce as they are in the Western US. I don't know as the answer to one ecological intervention is necessarily another drastic ecological intervention.
That being said, clearcutting strips of forest does provide zones of "edge" growth, which tend to have the greatest biological diversity, at least in alpine forests. These are not simple issues.
To return to our original lighthearted topic, p-magazines are inferior to e-magazines because after a couple of months finding an issue of a p-magazine requires major archeological excavation (if it has not in fact been recycled or used as bird-cage liner), whereas e-magazines can be searched for as long as you care to keep them on your hard drive.
