In my opinion, trees may be the only affordable solution to our atmospheric carbon problems, and planting more of them may be our only hope at this point. The only utility I see in this sapling cutting process would come if it were used as part of a forest planting operation. Go ahead and plant a field of saplings on three foot spacings. After five or ten years take out half of them, leaving those with good structure or good sugar content uncut. Eventually they could be thinned out to some normal tree plantation spacing and from then on operate as a normal sugar bush. If the ultimate goal was a forest, I could get behind this idea...but not otherwise.