This painting's title is a play on words. The painting is depicting a stand of dead lodge pole pines infested with the pine beetle. It is a dense forest but up to it is completely torn down (logged clear cut). The issue is anything but "clear cut" because the trees are dead and should be harvested, however, the wood is only marginally usable because the pine beetle dries out and ruins the timber. The longer the tree is infested, the more brittle the wood becomes, which urges people to harvest the forests as quickly as possible via clear cut logging, or risk letting them rot and destroy any usefulness of the timber and add to green house gasses as the wood decays.