"See the issue is, at least in the southern U.S. they clear cut nearly everything in the 1800s. There is very little old growth left."

I pity them. Real forest is something very different, than a wood farm.

With the recent droughts and dying out of the monoculture spruce, more and more mixed forest is coming back to europe. Idealism brought a little change, but the big drive was the huge economical loss of the timber industry that forced them to rethink how to do things.