Garth Lenz

Industrial landscape: Clearcuts

Photographs of industrial forestry and logging by environmental photo journalist Garth Lenz.

   
  
     
  
This may be the World's most southerly clearcut. Originally deforested for cattle grazing, it is at the tip of Mainland Chile with the Straits of Megellan visible in the background. As clearcut logging pushes further north into areas that were previously intact, so to does industrial logging now threaten southern areas like Tierra del Fuego, which until recent times was free of industrial logging.
   
  
Another early aerial image while flying with Vicky Husband of the Sierra Club back in 1990. Yaky Kop Cone, Quatsino Inlet, Vancouver Island. B.C. Nicknamed "Mr T" by Doug Tompkins when edited for the book "CLEARCUT."
     
  
   
  
A common feature of the boreal is the site of patchwork logging. Often used as a way to get around clearcut size restrictions, it merely spreads the damage and fragmentation over a larger area. This particular clearcut is in Wood Buffalo National Park. this is the World's second largest National Park, and straddles the Alberta/Northwest territories border. The park contains on of the greatest inland deltas - the Athabasca Delta - and is the sole breeding ground for the Whooping Crane. Logging was approved as part of the war effort during the Second World War. The permission to log in a National Park was only terminated in 1992.