A clearcut area may be relatively small, or may span for miles, and is often clearly visible through the air, along with the scars of logging roads cut to access it. The abrupt removal of trees can have a serious environmental impact on the surrounding area.

Negative impacts(by wikipedia)

Clearcutting can have major negative impacts. These have been cited as soil erosion, poor quality re-growth, increased risk of pest epidemics, increased wildfires, loss of biodiversity, and loss of economic sustainability and increased environmental instability, loss of carbon contributing to global warming and so on.[4] Unfortunately the response of governments around the world has sometimes been to marginalize community, environmental, social and academic concerns and defer to the logging industry.

Image via Wikipedia

Old-growth wood often bears the scars of countless centuries, focusing interest on optimally reproductive mid-growth trees, the forest powerhouses that in most market species are 200 to 500 years old. In undisturbed environments, old-growth forest shelters many optimal specimens. A number of attempts have been made to ameliorate the effects of clearcutting: encouraging natural regrowth, careful selective seeding (monocropping) and burn-out. However these attempts have to date been poorly managed and sporadic, and not based on unbiased forestry science. Where resource economies do not include purposeful seeding, the resulting clearcut re-growth is always unhealthy and prone to fire damage.

Clearcut re-seeding (that is improperly planned) has all of the same negative fire and disease effects of natural regrowth clearcuts. Another reseeding disadvantage, that is extensive where managed forestry companies exceed cuts and fill in slope margins with compulsory plantings, is mono-crop disease leading to soil failure. For instance, clearcutting on steep slopes always results high soil erosion rates. Tree species that can handle higher soil acidity (associated with soil erosion) and with roots suitable to retain and partially rebuild soil, such as pine trees in monocrop plantations. Unfortunately, extensive use of pine has wiped out millions of hectares of diseased and burned re-growth forests. The pine beetle larvae lacking the checks found in old growth and are now epidemic in North America. Pine beetles burrow into re-growth pine mono-cropping and kill the trees just when they enter their productive life-cycle point of rapid growth that should last 100 to 200 years. Dead clearcut trees accelerate wildfires that are removing increasing amounts of the commercially useful vegetation in their path each year.

Image via Wikipedia