People started cutting down the tree in the America's nearly as soon as they got off the boat. They used the lumber to construct they're first houses, and other essential buildings. The forestry ind

ustry got its official start in 1633 with the construction of the first sawmill in the colonies. Today approximately 12,000 sawmills are operating in the United States (logging book). Soon though the colonies were shipping lumber back to England for they're buildings and ships (Encarta forestry industry). They cleared all the land up to the Appalachian Mountains with little resistance. After the American Revolution they began crossing these mountains and settling the plains for farming this demanded land free from trees. The farmers used a technique called cut and burn. This is when the lumber people go through and cut the best trees for their use and burn the rest in an effort to clear the land for some other use. In this fashion they worked they're way all the way to the northwestern United States. Here they found much bigger trees the Redwood, and Douglas firs, which grow to enormous proportions. All the way up to the twentieth century the logging companies cut trees without regard for the future. At this point most of the old growth had been cut for immediate use without any regard for any future need (Encarta, Logging history). In all the forestry industry in the United States cleared one half of its forests by 1900. Of the 583 million acres left 2/3 are owned by commercial logging companies. The other 1/3 is tied up in Federal and State parks and preserves, according to the article 'Forestry Industry' in the Encarta encyclopedia.

Today however logging is a very different process, involving technologies, such as chain saws and computers. In the modern cutting of trees they use a wide range on tool. The type of tree cutters used today depends on the type of terrain. If the area is relatively flat a mechanical feller called a shear is used to clear the trees. The shear has two blades that work like a pair of scissors, cutting through the trunk of the tree and carefully laying it on its side. The shear works very quickly, it can take as little as 30 seconds to cut a tree 8 inches thick. A shear working on level terrain can cut 25 cords of wood per day. Two men working with a chain saw can only clear about 4 cords of wood in the same amount of time. The chain saw has an advantage over the shear on the large trees located in the Pacific Northwest. Here the cutting blades of the shear cannot fit around the enormous trunks of a Douglas fir or a Redwood tree. The chain saws can slowly but surly make it all the way through the enormous trunk of these giant trees. Now unlike the days before all the technological advances in the field when the cutters fell a tree they carefully plan where to lay the trees down without crushing people or damaging other trees in the process. Next the limbs and branches of the tree are bucked. This is a way of saying they remove the excess limbs, which make moving the trees extremely hard. When th

Some common words found in the essay are:
Pacific Northwest, Industry' Encarta, Sealy Fourdrinier, Northwestern United, American Revolution, Encarta Logging, David Guterson, Redwood Douglas, Appalachian Mountains, logging book, cut log, forestry industry, logging industry, cut log boards, cords wood, trunk tree, cutting trees, belt passes, essential buildings, account logging industry, cut trees,
Approximate Word count = 1934
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)