Ingmar Lee

So crystal clear to anyone who has worked much in clearcuts, -they're all massive incinerators in waiting. The residual post-logging slash fuel loading is enormous. Logging slash takes decades to rot to the point where it lies flat on the ground, prior to which it's like a fluffy, aerated layer spread over the ground, at times as much as 6 ft deep, especilly on the coast, where the slash layer can be monumental. Everything in the clearcut dries out rapidly towards summer and the wind flows and the sun beats down. The "edge forest" surrounding the clearcut also dessicates from wind and sun egre

As a professional BC treeplanter and silviculture worker for 21 years, I've planted more than a million trees myself, and supervised the planting of ten million more. I've also spaced, pruned, brushed, weeded and vexared in the post-clearcut plantations. Anyone who has looked out the window of an airplane while flying across British Columbia sees a wilderness that looks like it's been hit by a shotgun blast, -a vast patchwork of industrial corporate clearcutting that extends to every horizon. Treeplanters crawl through every inch of those clearcuts and see directly for themselves the incr

It should be noted that the image provided with Briony Penn's excellent article is of neither an Aframax or Panamax tanker as discussed, but rather it is the "Sound Reliance," -an American ATB (Articulated Tug/Barge) tanker, which delivers oil products back and forth between the Kinder Morgan, Chevron and Suncor spigots, and Washington State Refineries. The "Sound Reliance" is amongst the very largest of the ATB tanker fleet which plies between Puget Sound and the Salish Sea. ATB Tankers have a gruesome track record of disasters along the BC Coast, including the wreck of the ATB "Nathan E Stew