Forest giants felled for a driveway

I saw these this morning. I was told they came from SE Tennessee where they were cut when a "fella" needed to have a driveway up to the top of his mountain for a building site.

Most were Poplar and a few oaks.

Pretty sad. Maybe they'll be used for lumber or something, rather than being wasted.

They will be used but still very sad, imho. I have a wood house but it's pine, so much more renewable, I think.

Sad? Gosh, I see logging trucks on the highway all the time, loaded much heavier. I don't understand why that is sad. I guess its part of our economy here.

You wanna cry, read the account of a Eucalyptus regnans felled in Tasmania in 1944. If there's interest I'll search for it and find a link. The only consolation is that this monster probably was approaching the end of its lifespan and would have died of old age in a century or so. (This is the only species that seriously rivals the giant sequoia for title of Biggest Tree; it's surely the biggest non-conifer.) The real kicker is what they did with the wood: made newsprint. There are a handful of surviving trees of its size in all of Tasmania.

Here in north Florida it's live oaks that get people all emotional: they're big and they get in the way of any sort of construction, and as they're mostly limb, they don't even provide much useful lumber (limb wood has portions under tension, portions under compression, and when sawn into lumber will warp in strange ways, sometimes ruining a saw or injuring its operator), just firewood. At least they grow fairly quickly: a sixty-year-old live oak can be quite large and venerable looking, and the Cellon Oak, the largest in Florida, may be under 250 years old and requires steel cables to hold it together and a lightning rod on each major limb: it's about as big as a live oak can get without being destroyed by the forces of nature.

Yellow-poplar (tulip poplar, not a real poplar) grows quite large and can live to age 500 or so, has excellent if somewhat soft wood for a hardwood, and is also a fast grower in the right conditions. New-growth trees provide good wood, arguably of superior quality to old-growth, and I hope that they are being planted extensively. The strength-to-weight ratio is excellent, and I see this wood, with knot-free foot-wide boards available from relatively young trees, as a future alternative to pine, soft enough to be nailed, hard enough for furniture but not really for flooring. It looks odd and is usually stained to imitate cherry, as its heartwood, olive-drab when freshly cut though sometimes with strange streaks of red and brown, a more sedate brown after long exposure to light, is just too weird looking for many furniture buyers.

Down here it's mostly slash pine as a crop for paper pulp, plywood, dimension lumber, and treated poles. Always lumber trucks rumbling past, always a nearby acreage being cut or replanted...

Mark., they didn't leave enough giants in Florida to marvel at, I must admit

I don't see too many hardwoods being logged here. Most of them are like Gooley said, Slash and Loblolly pines. However, many local timber companies have recently switched to Longleaf, which was logged out early last century.

At least most building sites now do at least something with the timber. I remember when I was a kid that all the trees and brush were pushed into a pile and burned.

Cutting trees down is inevitable. Planting trees is the thing. Everybody, PLANT-MORE-TREES!!!

Scott

Agreed, plant more trees!

Here's the description of the felling of an E. regnans in 1942, quoted in http://farrer.csu.edu.au/ASGAP/eregn.html

"`It is recorded that two expert axemen, working on a platform 15 feet above the ground, took two and a half days to cut a scarf 6 feet deep into the mighty butt as a preliminary to sending the giant toppling to earth. The crash of its fall resounded for miles around and even hardened bushworkers are said to have downed tools in silent homage to the fallen monarch. Its age was put at 400 years and it was calculated that when Abel Tasman discovered the island in 1642 this tree was already a noble specimen of between 150 and 200 feet in height.'

"The tree `yielded 6770 cubic feet of wood which was pulped into 75 tons of newsprint.'"

Mark., probably more old-growth logging than there should be in Tasmania even now