Sawyer Bickford

 Growing up in Maine I’ve been fortunate to experience childhood largely in the forest. From building dams in the brook as a child, to camping in the woods for days on end as an adolescent, I’ve come to appreciate and understand the landscape that surrounds me. A breeze rolls from the White Mountains into the foothills and eventually the Atlantic. There are stands of hemlock and pine, and boulders beneath cliffs sticking out above the canopy.  Streams become brooks, and eventually the Saco River or Sebago Lake.  

Upon waking to the drone of chainsaws one morning I went on a hike to investigate. Leaving from home along the Saddleback Hills in Baldwin, I arrived at a false peak. I noticed a bare patch of woods. As I approached, the smell of fresh wood and oil increased. I stood at the top of the clearcut, looking from the raw earth beneath my feet down into the valley where the cut ended. As I came back throughout the following weeks the clearcut grew higher into the once-forested mountain.

This scenario is happening regularly in Maine. A mountain will be cleared from top to bottom, a stack of trees will appear and disappear. I was curious how this could be. What are the effects on the environment? Is this sustainable? Does this happen everywhere? 

It seems that every year it’s the same thing, only a different location. The forest is cleared until there is nothing left but bare patches and thick scrub. The land, scarred by equipment dragging logs, erodes from a lack of root base to hold it together. The few remaining trees blow over because they haven’t grown strong enough to sustain winds without other trees to block them. 

Sustainable logging practices intend to keep balance between the economy and ecology. If practiced correctly, the forest can remain healthy for animals and people alike to collect resources from it long into the future. Some companies even plant trees after an area has been cut to ensure healthy trees in the future. In a forest that has been harvested sustainably one would see trees of varying type and size still standing, leaving diversity and habitat for wildlife. After 10 years you would be pressed to see erosion or a vast amount of small scrub. The casual observer might not even notice it was logged after 10 or 20 years besides the main tracks left by the heavy trucks.

The issue arises when an entire mountain side or valley is depleted of all but a handful of trees. One begins to see erosion and a lack of animal life that had been there before. The topsoil washes into the streams and brooks, killing fish and insects. This topsoil is where most of the nutrients are. Most animals will not enjoy this any more than the plants or aquatic life. The lack of tree coverage creates too much of an expanse for prey and predator to be seen by one another. There is no cover from the sun to be found. There is no food. 

After 5 years, an area that was once mature, healthy trees will likely be so overgrown with scrub that it will be difficult to walk through. The trees will all be in direct competition to reach above the others. In a normal not logged forest, this occurs when a tree falls, leaving a patch of sun for other trees to inhabit. In this scenario there is still limited light, and only available to a select number of lucky plants. In the clear cut scenario every plant for miles is in competition with each other. This causes every tree to rise as quickly as possible, leaving little for the tree to make it’s root base and trunk healthy. When every tree that is currently growing on a mountain is doing this, they end up as tall, spindly trees, generally all of the same type - the type that can grow fastest. Animals have extreme difficulty navigating through these areas. 

Hiking through the hills where I grew up you pass through various stages of this phenomenon. You’ll spend hours in a seemingly endless sea of millions of tiny little trees, unable to see 50 feet in any direction, before coming out to a completely open space - the most recent cut. As the rate of this increases the amount of harvestable, let alone inhabitable, forest decreases. With trees being cut faster than they can grow, with no efforts to be replenished, one starts to wonder how long this can be continued. Is it sustainable? 

unnatural is a group of photographs comprised of the things I encountered while investigating these industrial logging and quarrying sites. During the project a large chunk of land stretching across most of the Saddleback Hills, where I’ve grown up, was cut. An estimated 2,500 acres of forest, or an 8th of the town, was lost. This is already in an area of concern due to the heavy amount of clearcutting prior to this year.  

The weekend after photographing the Saddleback Hills, distraught and trying not to think about logging, I discovered a sandpit less than a half hour from Portland. Owned by a company that has over a dozen sandpits in the area, I thought I knew what to expect, but upon arrival I immediately knew I didn’t. After about five hours of hiking, from the sandy peaks way above where the forest canopy would have been, to the bedrock far below the surface of the Earth, I had made it halfway across the pit. This sandpit takes up a 10th of the town it’s in. Unlike the trees taken out of a clearcut, sand and rock make no attempt to regrow. With no value to the land left in any way, it is often essentially abandoned, at best filled in with torn up pavement or trash. 

unnatural is intended to expose people to this destruction of the land. The photographs are of places within 3 hours of traveling distance from Portland, Maine. Being a place I care greatly about, it’s hard to see it exploited. The locations are often out of sight, being places one normally wouldn’t go to, and because of this can often go unnoticed, despite their impact. Exploring these places was an informative, firsthand experience with something I have been curious about for a long time. The photographs are my observations as I wandered throughout these places, seeking some sort of understanding as to why they are.