Clearcutting, a forestry practice where every tree is harvested from an often-large area, was celebrated as a spectacle of industrial achievement in training, advertising, and informational film and video produced by Canada's British Columbian forest industry in the twentieth century. As environmentalist and activist concerns about clearcutting's impacts on biodiversity, habitat, and Indigenous cultural practices grew in the 1980s, images of logged hillsides began to be viewed by the public as “clearcut horror.” Like ecohorror, clearcut horror reminded viewers of the violence of ecological devastation. But for forest workers, inured to the image-making of the forestry industry, clearcuts were part of a guarantee of safety, efficiency, and economic security in unpredictable remote natural environments. This article compares activist and industrial image-making of the 1980s and 1990s during the conflict of British Columbia's War in the Woods to examine how forest workers were implicated in both care and devastation of the forest, identifying the unique affect of ecohorror with the worker's minoritarian perspective on clearcutting as a strategy for survival. On the one hand, industry advertising and informational films dwelt on the achievements of the forest industry, contesting and ignoring clearcut horror. On the other hand, activist documentaries failed to recognise the interdependence of worker and forest. Rarely were the visceral and embodied risks visited on the forest worker expressed on film. Through close reading and discourse analysis of employee newspapers and film texts, and engagement with texts on ecohorror and visibility of environmental issues, this article examines how the visual culture of forestry reflected clearcut horror.
Joceline Andersen (Wed,) studied this question.