"Cutting down" a forest is often a hugely destructive act...depending on the forest. Forests need to go through generations of trees to reach a fire resistant and carbon sequestering stable state. When all trees in a stand are cut down the next generation of trees will often be limited to species that can grow in disturbed and degraded soils, which are often the result of removing the entire canopy and opening the forest floor to heat, drying, and erosion. Such trees are often not those desired either for future timber harvest, carbon sequestration, or habitat provision.
The mature forests cut down by "settlers" had high canopies and trees with straight, limbless trunks covered with thick fire resistant bark. The forest floors had deep moist "duff" kept that way by the shading of the canopy. These trees grew under an existing canopy and had to race up to to claim openings appearing periodically as trees died and/or were toppled by storms. They threw out few large limbs until they reached the canopy, resulting in the straight, limbless and knot free trunks.
When an entire stand is removed the trees that grow in the large opening ARE the canopy. Starting at the ground they throw out limbs that grow large all the way from the forest floor to the eventual high canopy. These limbs die as the tree grows, starved of light as the lifting canopy shades them, and so create a fire ladder of dead, highly flammable wood from floor to canopy. Of course some of them break off and fall to the floor, adding fuels to whatever ground fires come through and helping to create fire storm conditions.
Cutting entire stands should be done judiciously and with the help of forest science, If the existing trees are valuable for their lumber they can often be taken selectively. with both economics and forest health in mind. Much of our current fire bomb conditions in our forests are NOT the result of fire suppression, as so many are willing to claim, but instead are the result of our "clear cutting" logging practices which have dried out, heated up, and massively increased fuels available at ground level to inevitable wild fires.
