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Cliff Watson stands ankle-deep in Alaskan mud, watching 25,000 pounds of massive, unpeeled logs come bounding up a steep slope. The logs, hauled by a steel cable as thick as Arnold Schwarzenegger's neck, make a sickening thunk-a thunk-a sound as they strike the now-barren land. Watson, a logging boss, looks on with an unmistakable air of macho pride as his three-man crew scrambles over the muddy hillside. They cinch lines called chokers to the felled trees, jumping back a split second before the logs are yanked up the hill by a "yarder," a ninety-foot-high tower with huge revolving drums at the base, around which the cables coil and uncoil with metallic shrieks and groans. "The thing about a clear-cut," says Watson, shouting over the roar of the yarder's diesel engine and the pounding rain, "is that it is a 100 percent right-here-right-now visual effect." "Clear-cut" means just what the word says. If it's a tree, it's coming down. Big or small, it makes no difference. Until a few days earlier, this mud-strewn valley of stumps was a forest of old-growth trees, unchanged for thousands of years. Now, because this is private land, the owners can do pretty much whatever they want with it, and that includes clear-cutting the forest and shipping the logs to Asia, where they're dissolved into pulp, processed and returned to America as cellophane and disposable diapers. VIEW ARTICLE AT Rain Forest Action Network

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