Denny, I always respect your opinion even when I disagree strongly with it because you do the research and are pretty even-handed. That said, there is no comparison between monoculture reforestation efforts and old growth forest.
Old Growth is better then monoculture reforested trees because it has the following qualities:
Withstands fires better.
Is less susceptible to destruction by insects.
Holds and releases water more evenly helping with that natural cleaning process of water filtering into the aquifer.
An Old Growth forest contains organisms not found anywhere else such as fungi that work in a symbiotic manner with the ancient trees to enrich the soil and fix nitrogen for them. There are thousands of these kind of interactions between 1000's of species in an old growth forest. These organisms have co-evolved over the vast millennia and are not found in secondary forests and some believe they are the key to turning a mature forest into an old growth forest.
An Old Growth forest Is vastly more bio-diverse - this may seem unimportant to you but consider that ALL of our medicines come from plants. They first isolate what they think is the active chemical to achieve a desired result (lower fever etc.). After the chemical is isolated it is then synthesized with petrochemicals. Also consider that we are just beginning to make use of DNA we find to make medicine and otherwise improve human life with genetic engineering.
As an aside, the way genetic engineering is currently done, I'm not completely a fan. If it's done ethically it could be a fantastic field for human endeavor.
The point is the rarest thing that humans know of is DNA, in that in all our exploration of the universe thus far we have found no evidence of it anywhere but on earth. To waste this vast encyclopedia of genetic success in our various organisms is a crime that exceeds the burning of the library of Alexandria.
Don't you see what a childish waste of the most precious and rare thing in the known universe this destruction is? It is sheer folly that we continue our destruction of these fully developed ancient ecosystems. The loss is incalculable, and our descendants, if they aren't dying in a depleted ecosphere that has gone completely amok, will look upon us with scorn that we wasted these finite and precious resources. More importantly, they will bemoan the rape and pillage of the most important thing of all: the creation we were born into.
I believe reforestation attempts are necessary, but without old growth forests they may never become old growth themselves. These ancient intact ecosystems that are like arks filled with rare life and they must be preserved. I'm not against planting and harvesting trees or mining or modern technology or the free market. I am against ecocide because it is tantamount to suicide. We can still have all of our wondrous inventions, we just have to change the way we look at our environment and resource use and become less wasteful. We should shift to being as energy and resource efficient as possible and also have our top scientists figure out the best way to restore the parts of the environment that we must leave wild in order that our medicine, food, air and water needs will be met.
We just need to radically transform our relationship with the environment I'm certainly not a luddite or a Marxist. I believe we can meet these challenges but not as long as some extraction corporations continue to lobby and propagandize about critical problems. These are critical problems that must be faced soon if we wish to avoid what scientists are increasingly telling us is certain doom. It's not a joke, it's not a conspiracy. There is a very real crisis going on in our environment from dead zones in the oceans to the logging of old growth and the death of coral reefs; there are vast global climactic shifts going on and it's increasingly obvious that with the industrial revolution and our subsequent population boom, we are more than able to wipe out so much life that it throws the whole planet out of whack. We are also the victims of our short term thinking, profit-only driven society. Look at the rates of cancer and autism. They are sky rocketing and in the case of cancer we know some is caused by plastics and carcinogenic chemicals.
Look, what we are doing isn't working anymore; we're seriously like a bunch of drunk teenagers destroying the house and making it unlivable. We don't have to stop living we just need to start being the stewards of creation that we are told we are in the Bible and elsewhere.
