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The Pacific Northwest is replete with areas that show the effects of ongoing resource exploitation patterns. None of these is more readily apparent, over wider areas, than the practice of clear-cut logging, practiced in the Northwest for fifty years. Clear-cutting has some conspicuous advantages, mostly economic and to the benefit of the logger, but it does allow the ready replanting of an area back into new and genetically improved forest species. These, however, amount to an arboreal monoculture, and they are regarded with skepticism by both environmentalists and, in terms of their ugliness, by the general public. The United States Forest service, which once strongly favored clear cutting, is now less sure.
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