Editor:
A letter in the Dec. 12 edition said, “clear-cut logging destroys biodiversity.”
I would respect Elphinstone Logging Focus’s (ELF) arguments for preserving forest areas if they stuck more closely to scientific logic.
Their assertion implies that ecosystems are somehow inferior when their species counts are low. Let’s condemn some, then: deep and sunless under Antarctic ice live scant populations of blind and transparent ice-fish. The alkali dry lakes of Utah support shrimp that survive for years with no water in what is baked soda mud. On the ocean floor, volcanic vents spew hydrogen sulfide at 350 degrees C, in which live communities of microbes and gastropods.
Are synthetic structures ecologically barren? Perth Airport in Australia is home to 134 vertebrate species. At airports everywhere over 200 different kinds of bacteria live on jet fuel; they love it so much that they increase and plug the filters. The hull of the Titanic is nourishing 27 different species of iron-eating bacteria. Are these inferior ecosystems, and is biodiversity absent or destroyed?
Mother Nature is not a competitive ratings game in which the hectare of land with the most species is “the best.”
Perhaps there are fewer species in a clear-cut than in the surrounding timber, but perhaps there are more.
I would respect ELF statements if they announced, for instance: “We oppose logging because we dislike the companies that log and sell timber, the government that encourages them, the machinery and its noise, the loggers and their work culture, and the variation that logging produces in the appearance of the landscape.”
Say that and I will not controvert you, because that statement would be based on inarguable fact: the fact of your authentic and inalienable feelings. But it’s not biology.
David Kipling, Gibsons
