Walking Through Clearcuts

2017 - present

Like a war torn landscape, clearcuts are photographic and forward facing. Once you leave the logging road to traverse the cut, walking is difficult. It’s inhumane by nature but also necessary by demand. Sometimes I will walk at the edge of a recently cleared area, a place where the air moves between a forested block and a cut block. When in the forest the imagination cannot see how this could become that. History will not look back kindly on how we logged and what we lost in the process. When I was 12 or 13, a five-acre plot of woods behind my families house was cleared for a cul-de-sac. Those woods held my childhood, most of my imagination took form in there. It is where I learned about the pileated woodpecker, barred owls, sword ferns, tree swings, friendship and boyhood. When the trees were taken away, a huge hole was left. During a rainstorm it filled with 10 feet of water. Before jumping in, Mom warned my brother and I about the metal at the bottom of the muddy puddle. Until now, I did not realize it was a baptism.

“Americans seem to want the product, at the cheapest possible price, while objecting loudly to its harvest.”

-The Final Forest, William Dietrich