According to the ecologist Chris Maser, merely removing fallen logs and dead trees would result in the loss of almost a third of non-bird wildlife species in a forest. These losses seemed irrelevant to scientific foresters, who targeted maximum “sustained yield” and, tellingly, “minimum diversity.” Yet over time they altered the ecology of the forest and exposed the trees to fungi and other invasive species. The new, tidy forest, with each tree the same size and the same species, was easily exploited, not just by foresters but by parasites.
