First American Settlers

When settlers first came to the New World forests covered ____ per cent of the land. The forests all had a wide range of trees and bushes in them. The "primeval forest" or the first forest Europeans came into contact with had been changed by many acts of nature such as floods, hurricanes, and flood. Actions of Native Americans also had a hand in changing forests. Such forests included redwood forests, which were home to huge redwood trees, mossy forests, and swamp forests. To many European settlers, these forests represented a wild and evil area. Many feared the forests and wilderness as the antithesis of civilization, community, and religion. One group in particular, the Puritans, viewed the forests not as an abundance of natural resources but as an impediment to settlement. Once forests began to be viewed as beneficial, it opened up a whole new lifestyle. The forests and nature might have been an evil and scary place, but it was a place filled with resources and opportunity. Settlers began using trees and wood in a plethora of ways. Not only was it used for families own use, many began logging forests as a business; a very profitable business at that. Once wood started being used for beneficial purposes, a snowball effect occurred by the settlers to cut down every tree in sight and turn it into a profit. Logging was the process of cutting down numerous amounts of trees to use wood in a capitalist way or to clear land for agricultural purposes. Two main techniques were used by the settlers to clear away these large forests. One technique was called girdling. Girdling is the process of cutting a strip of bark off of the circumference of the tree which eventually killed it. Another technique used for deforestation is the "cut and burn" method. This method was the process of cutting down many of the trees and burning the rest of the brush and plants to clear land. Cutting down these massive amounts of forest proved to be a very difficult