Everyone should be outraged at the ugly scars on formerly green mountain sides, left by

clear cutting.

The practice of removing not just the trees needed for logging, but everything else as

well, leaving only their dirt.

But many of us are not completely aware of the reasons this is done.

Today we're going to let forestry science answer the question of whether clear cutting

truly does reduce the amount of old growth forest, or if it might counterintuitively leave

us with more.

That's today on Skeptoid.

You're listening to Skeptoid.

I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.

All about clear cutting.

Today we're going to dig into an emotionally charged issue, the clear cutting method of logging.

Which leaves the forest stripped clean of trees and everything else.

It raises anger among anti-logging activists who want the forests left natural.

And that causes conflict with the loggers, who note the activists still expect to fill

their lives with wood and paper products.

Some believe clear cutting is merely a lazy and destructive tool of the greedy, who couldn't

care less what the forests look like, or whether it can ever recover, so long as they can

extract every last penny from it.

Today we're going to find out whether clear cutting is truly as destructive as the activists

think, or whether it's as necessary as the loggers say, or whether there's a bit of truth

...