Forests, left to their own devices, end up with trees far too close
together for good root growth and effective nutrient absorption. Lots
die. The dead ones end up fueling forest fires that take all the trees.
Most logging companies today would take trees in such a way as to let
the remaining trees have room to grow, so they can come back in a dozen
years and harvest again.

That's the craziest thing I've read in a long time.

Uninformed too, but the question is Why?

The North American continent did not become heavily forested since the
last Ice Age because timber companies came in and were able to manage
them effectively by clearcuttiing or heavy selective cutting. Old
growth forests with healthy diversity and heavy plant cover were the
rule prior to that. The combination of climate, diverse soils,
relatively natural processes and yes, fire, created the extensive
patchwork of diverse forests that the early settlers met in North
America. Yes, there are some trees dead or dying in any forest - but
these trees, burned or unburned, make nutrients for the next generation
- and come on, show me any natural system where the dead don't
naturally follow the living and recycle themselves back into nutrients
for the new growth!

It is true that, if we look at it purely from a human use perspective,
a heavily managed forest is, at least over the mid-term, going to yield
more usable timber.

But, people aren't the only living things that depend on the forest for
their lives and livelihoods.

I strongly suggest to anyone who thinks that an undisturbed old growth
forest cannot be healthy, should come west (or even east) and look at
the incredible forests where people have chosen to preserve them.
Except for the cultivated timber tree species and obvious beneficiaries
of managed forests (like deer), the trees are bigger, the soil is
richer, the plants and animal species and numbers more numerous than
anywhere that forests have been disturbed and managed. Compare the
undisturbed Olympic rainforests, the redwood groves, the undisturbed
Sierra forests, the burned and remarkably rejuvenating forests of the
Yellowstone, the Alaskan Tongass, and especially the amazingly diverse
Appalachian forests in the Smokies, with any managed forest anywhere on
the continent. The differences are enormous and occasionally alarming.


If you want diversity and scores of animals and plants and magnificent
trees, old-growth is the way to go. These qualities are valuable and
cannot be maintained by more than inconsequential harvest programs. If
you want monocultures of neat tidy rows of trees ready to be sacrificed
every 40 years for maximum profit, then a managed fire-suppressed
plantation is the way to go. This is valuable too, but in a very
different way.

Bruce Jensen