It is a type of logging equipment; a particularly fearsome one too, as I'll get to in a moment. The machine has kind of a funny, old-timey-sounding name, kinda like "rock 'em sock 'em robots" or something like that, but it does exactly what its composite name suggests.
You can see huge scars open up on the valley walls within a week of the work of a single operator, which is quite striking. Something like this used to take legions of logging professionals, and now you can see one single machine with its headlights swinging back and forth up on the hillside, grabbing and cutting down the trees and then laying them down onto piles (bunching them) for later collection. It looks quite lonely really.
Felling a tree can be quite an affecting and tragic event, but if you are cutting down one tree roughly every ten seconds (like this guy was) you probably eventually become less sensitive to it, if you were to begin with. Even from this distance, this guy appeared to be pretty good at what he was doing, a highly skilled and specialized occupation, pivoting and cutting constantly and smoothly, precisely laying the trees where they needed to go, in a certain direction, for later smooth and systematic collection, after which they'll probably be gathered by other machinery and then passed through a machine of rollers and saws that rapidly delimb them in seconds, which can mean hours and hours of work for a single person working on a single fallen tree.
A massive, rolling, and nearly silent slaughter from that distance, save for the constant whine of the feller's blade, with the pitch changing as the blade cut every 10 seconds or so.
There is a lot happening both subjectively and economically here, and I'll try to address as much as I can in as compact of a space as possible, hopefully without it getting too busy and convoluted.
I'm not sure about the particular process I was watching, but it is worth illustrating the general state of the industry and its current path of evolution. Over time logging in the US - like just about everything else here - has become increasingly private equity-run, or at least run by large financialized companies, which as we know favors accelerating, rationalizing, and slimming down production processes in full favor of short term returns. The ownership structures too are increasingly fragmented physically, in favor of a larger financial consolidation which runs counter to that process. So ownership at the same time becomes decoupled from the land itself and the infrastructure, simultaneously as financial and managerial ownership consolidates.
So there are typically companies that hold the land and own the timber, and then contract out the logging companies who come in and clear-cut the forest, and then are given a cut of the proceeds of the sold lumber. Trucking companies get in on this as well, hauling the lumber to market. Exemplifying this pattern is the timberland giant Weyerhaeuser, which has absorbed a number of other timber companies and developed into something of a financial services and real estate company.
The increasingly short term aims have transformed the physical infrastructure itself, and they have shortened the gathering cycles. A harvest has gone down from 50 years or so, which is still a potentially short lifespan for a tree, to a 25 year turnover. As a result, the average tree size has gotten smaller, and the various mills in operation have been tooled for smaller and smaller trees, and then of course more trees have to be harvested to make up for the loss in biomass.
Clear-cutting is hard on the local ecology: it wipes out habitat, heats up the region, removes windbreak protection and shade from neighboring trees, and the loss of living root systems means the soil is less able to hold water and erodes easier, and so nutrients are lost as well. Further, the heavy machinery tends to destroy the mycelium networks. More trees are planted in favor of the next harvest cycle, but the region itself is steadily impoverished and becomes less diverse. Yes, a whole field of carbon sinks is wiped out, but we have to remember too: older and larger trees are more effective as carbon sinks, so it also results in a generational deterioration of the carbon sinking capacity of entire regions as they are cyclically cut and replanted, and this problem gets worse as the harvesting accelerates and regions of harvest widen as market competition continues to intensify.
So, the competition: the company conducting this particular harvest was paying one operator (which includes the recouped investment on the machine) to carve out vast swathes of timberland to go to market, and very rapidly. This is a devastating rate of return, and this particular technological complex has been available to the industry for quite some time now.
The feller buncher makes ruthless economic sense in a world where everyone has access to this machinery, but that economic sense has to be held in relation to the global value chain. A shift from muscle power to machines like this implies centuries of technological development, and the location and control of that development implies centuries more, and even millennia of geopolitical positioning and influence. To have access to that machinery, you have to be rich enough and have the geopolitical permission to do so, and those who do surely do it, facing the matter of what to do with the growing legions of sullen and disaffected labor.
There is immense global pressure to remain at the top of that value chain, so as to concentrate enough wealth to remain at the cutting edge of that perpetual process of technological revolution. The difference between muscle power and something like this feller buncher machine is simply too vast in terms of time and energy sunk into a given branch of industry.
Simultaneously as competition continues to advance and intensify, you have an intensification and acceleration of the rates of exploitation, which involve processes of immense social upheaval as whole tranches of labor are thrown into obsolescence, simultaneously as ecologies everywhere continue to degrade.
The structure of this process is in the process of changing dramatically now, but it is hard to imagine the greater conditions of imperial competition changing anytime soon.
