#we have cedars on this coast that are OLD GROWTH. nobody but weird tree ppl seem to care bc THEYRE UGLY AF AND SMALL.

[badolmen]

Look at me. LOOK at me. Old growth forests are important. Their loss is violence against the land.

BUT that isn’t a reason to point at younger, perfectly healthy closed canopy forests and claim they’re ecologically insignificant or bad. Their sparse understory is a function of closed canopy forests. Even old growth forests will have sparse understories if the canopy is closed. That’s how photosynthetic strata works.

The west coast has vastly different forests and history than the east. The rare volcanic eruption that made the giant stands of Douglas fir in the west possible would be literally impossible here. Our species are adapted for stand replacing fires set by indigenous peoples to drive deer and rejuvenate oak. Oak as a genus is dying here. We can’t set fires. We can’t harvest patches large enough to simulate a fire. Our deer are overpopulated and browse down every sprout that dares to reach for sunlight.

Making a sweeping ban on clear-cut and similarly ‘scary’ harvests would kill them for good. The restrictions on fire have nearly done that to species like Jack and pitch pine that rely heavily on fire to establish. They’ve been relegated to pine barrens and the rare sandy forest clearing. Our fire Cherry, thankfully, can last decades in the soil seedbank. You can only see them the first few decades after a large, complete harvest and then they die.

What’s good for one forest kills another. Not all trees are made ecologically equal - and that’s a very good thing. All trees and forests have their ecological value. Management of one forest is never applicable to other forests; they all have their own unique histories and communities that should be imitated when possible and left alone when not.