Picture the North American continent as a huge lawn. Then imagine a vast, slow lawn mower moving from east to west. The mower begins in the East about the middle of the nineteenth century. By the end of the twentieth, it has mowed virtually everything from the Atlantic coast to the Pacific Northwest.

This mower is industrial forestry. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it stripped away virtually all the forests east of the Mississippi, leaving bare earth, ugliness, depleted soils, erosion, and raging floods in its wake. Eastern forests having more or less been leveled by the 1930s, it passed on to the pine forests of the Rockies and the redwood forests of California, and north to the vast rainy woods of Washington and Oregon. (Cutting began in the West, of course, with the arrival of white settlers and continued in the East as it began to devastate the West. Moreover, trees were cut, not in wide swaths across the landscape, but in a patchwork. Still, the general trend was from east to west.) The recent battles over the spotted owl in the Northwest were less about an owl than about the last fragments of the nation’s old-growth forests, which the owl symbolized.

The northwestern corner of the lawn is now nearly mowed. But the eastern—and particularly the southeastern—end has been growing for many decades. Southern Appalachian hills, which less than a century ago were treeless and brown with mud, are, many of them, once again forested and green. And so the mower is turning inexorably back toward the Southeast.

This historic movement of industrial forestry is one of the greatest impending threats to the diversity of life in Southern Appalachia. Its harbingers are the chip mills.

A chip mill is an enormous forest-grinding machine. Fed by streams of logging trucks (hundreds per day for a large mill), it debarks the logs and grinds them into chips that are used primarily for making paper and particle board. To supply a chip mill, which may run round the clock, loggers must strip and haul away dozens of acres of forest each day from a sourcing radius of about seventy-five miles around the mill. The process leaves behind scarred earth, vanished wildlife, flooded streams, and (ultimately) the broken promise of lasting jobs.

So far the losses have been heaviest in Alabama and Mississippi, where the mills have quick access to international markets via the Tennessee-Tombigbee waterway and the port of Mobile Bay. In Alabama and Mississippi existing chip mills have been cutting wood faster than it can grow since the 1980s. And as forests in the deep south have been progressively ground into pulp and consumed, the overcutting has moved closer to Southern Appalachia.

The most recent mill to plague East Tennessee was opened a few years ago by Champion International, near Caryville about forty miles north of Knoxville. This large highly efficient mill, whose crane is visible from Exit 141 of Interstate 75, will strip many tens of thousands of acres of trees, mostly hardwoods, from Campbell, Scott, and Anderson Counties. And Champion is no more likely to respect the forest in East Tennessee than it did in Montana in the early nineties, where it clearcut eight hundred thousand acres at three times the rate of tree growth. According to Dr. Thomas Power, the chair of the Economics Department at the University of Montana, Missoula, "Champion came in here promising they would be here forever, and then just overcut all the trees and left."

It is argued, of course, that trees are a renewable resource and that the use of trees is more sustainable than the use, for example, of oil. That's true. Forests can and should be used sustainably to supply necessary wood and wood products. The problem with chip mills is that the ultimate product they supply is paper, most of which is used for packaging—and most packaging is used once and thrown away. Using our forests to make lumber to build houses that will last a century or so makes sense. Stripping them away to make cheap packaging that will be used once and then carted off to take up space in a landfill is a foolish and false economy. Unfortunately, that seems to be the chief mission of the chip mills.