I think that you’ve got the issues a bit mixed up, @Aesthetic_Mess. “Clear-cutting” a stand of timber, which is the “cheapest” way to harvest lumber, leaves the land vulnerable to erosion from hard rains. That is, the trees that used to shield the land from the direct force of rain no longer do that, the undergrowth is often stripped out and burned with the waste limbs and leaves of the trees (since they have no economic value), and rains can harm the land in two ways:
1. On hillsides, the topsoil that takes centuries to accumulate can be washed away into streams in just a few short growing seasons. That means that the hillside is less able to support new growth of timber, and the streams are polluted with silt and runoff from the hills, making them less able to support the aquatic life that lives in them.
2. On flat areas such as the Amazon River basin, the land is notoriously poor to begin with, and the rains on denuded land leach whatever minerals have been accumulated on the surface back underground with the rainwater, or into the river and out to sea.
The clear-cut “slash burn” also contributes to air pollution, especially when the clear-cutting is done on an “industrial” scale of square miles of land at a time.
Cutting lumber and using it in construction of long-lived objects such as housing is actually a good thing, if you’re concerned about carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, because wood is a “carbon sink”. So if you use and preserve the wood that’s used, and plant trees to replace what is harvested, then you’re actually doing some good for the atmosphere (and the land), because young fast-growing trees utilize carbon dioxide more than mature older trees. (And if trees are left to die and decay naturally, then they give off their CO2 in a slow oxidation process—rotting—which is chemically nearly the same as burning, only much, much slower.)