SPENCER MOUNTAIN, Tenn. -- If many trees are cut down in a forest, but others are planted to take their place, is it still a forest?
Or is a forest something more elusive: a repository of varied life forms, a cradle for clear-running streams, a historical continuum where children and their fathers and grandfathers can sit atop old stumps, watch for squirrels and talk?
That's the question posed here in central Tennessee, where giant timber-cutting machines shear native trees off Spencer Mountain like skin off a black bear.
Mathematically, clear-cutting tens of thousands trees is not a problem. The South is growing more trees than it is cutting. By mid-century, trees may well cover more ground than they do today.
The issue is that as the timber industry cuts the region's slow-growing oaks, hickories and other hardwoods to feed the nation's ravenous appetite for computer paper, chipboard and other consumer products, it is planting a sterile substitute: vast pine tree plantations.
Many biologists dismiss these new forests as nothing more than tree farms. A real forest, they argue, is something more messy, primal and elusive -- a place to learn not just about nature and hunting but about the world of your ancestors.
Tennessee is emblematic of the transformation sweeping the South, which today produces more wood products than any single country on Earth.
The 13 Southern states account for nearly 60 percent of the United States' wood output, almost four times the current volume of the once-mighty Pacific Northwest. The escalating timber market is altering landscapes from Georgia to Arkansas, turning oak forests, farm fields and marshes into man-made seas of planted pine.
The question of whether these stands are forests or farms is a new turn in a centuries-old quarrel over the role of forests in America
Consider the 1890s feud between two pioneering giants in their fields -- environmentalist John Muir and forester Gifford Pinchot -- about the purpose of the first forest preserves. Muir envisioned them as preserves for wildness, containing "thousands of God's wild blessings." Pinchot saw them as more utilitarian, where trees would not only grow but provide valuable building materials.
The new forests are not the forests that Tennesseans recall from childhood.
The trees are mostly loblolly pine, grown in rows, mostly the same age, the same height and cut at the same time by giant machines. The loblolly stands are fertilized and managed and devoid of many native plants and animals.
Government and industry foresters say the plantations are highly productive and emulate many of the roles of natural tree stands. More efficient forests, they say, mean that more wilderness can remain unscathed. Timber companies contend that years of "high-grading" in old groves -- harvesting the best and strongest trees -- has weakened the forests, leaving behind spindly stands.
"You end up with what a professor I had in school called 'green junk,' " said Sharon Haines, International Paper manager of sustainable forestry.
Ecologists counter that given time and sunlight, a small oak will grow larger, and that even a crooked tree can hold a songbird's nest.
Most tree farms produce a single species, the fast-sprouting loblolly, in place of a slower growing mixture of native Tennessee oaks, hickories and sycamores. The loblollies can be harvested by machine and replaced with seedlings in as little as 25 years, two to five times faster than the regrowth of a traditional forest.
The amount of southern land devoted to pine plantations will increase 67 percent to 54 million acres -- an area the size of Utah -- by 2040, predicts a report by the U.S. Forest Service. Natural forests of all types will decline 17 percent, meanwhile, with the most dramatic conversion occurring in Tennessee.
Barry Graden, forestry development manager for Bowater Inc., one of Tennessee's largest timber companies, is proud of his new forests.
He shows off a stand of young, green loblollies, saying they provide nesting habitat for quail, shelter for deer, wild turkeys and rabbits, easy foraging for hawks and eagles.
But Graden and other forest experts concede that when planted loblollies grow taller, the sunlight dims and creatures disperse.
"As the canopy closes on a planted pine stand, that diversity will drop off rather substantially," said David Wear, co-author of the recent Forest Service report.
The Forest Service report regards the growth of plantations as an important hedge against suburban sprawl.
Paul E. Davis, director of water pollution control at the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, said pine plantations treat the land and water more gently than a 100-store mall surrounded by acres of asphalt.
The conversion to plantations has been going on for half a century. But the process accelerated in the past two decades as Fortune 500 timber companies moved away from the Northwest to the friendlier regulatory atmosphere of the South. Most Southern forests are privately owned and immune from the environmental restrictions imposed on the federal forests of the West.
Unlike California, most Southern states do not require timber companies that cut trees on private land to draw up plans to protect wildlife and water quality.
There is no lone imperiled species, like the Northern spotted owl, which became the icon of the Northwest timber wars. Nor can even a small number of Southern forests be called "primeval," as in the West, since generations of Southern settlers cleared trees for farmland that in time were overgrown by new forests. Today's pine plantations flourish on abandoned farms in southern Appalachia, Florida grasslands and in the coastal lowlands of the Carolinas.
Around Spencer Mountain and elsewhere in rural Van Buren County, neon green swaths of non-native loblollies intermingle with the brown bark of hardwoods. Thin bands of trees called beauty strips still line the roads, masking the clear-cuts beyond.
"They hurt this mountain out here," said William Bouldin, 84, whose father taught him to cut trees one at a time. "It ain't nothing but a pile of brush."
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