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Comment by Cyberdog | Hacker News Reader

If by "redwood forest" you only mean old-growth forests, sure. The trees being harvested commercially today are only a few decades old. Second-growth and managed forests won't have the occasional ancient giants the old-growth ones have but they are still clearly forests to the humans and other animals living among them.

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I mean the forest in the article that was turned into decking.

> The trees being harvested commercially today are only a few decades old.

The province of British Columbia publishes figures on old growth logging. They're cutting down ~40,000 hectares per year. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/old-growth-l...

I worked for Weyerhaeuser Canada in the late 90's / early 00's when they bought Macmillan Bloedel. This was notable because Weyerhaeuser quietly harvested in the interior of BC and Northern Alberta/Sask - much of it secondary growth - while MacBlow was ground-zero of the old growth fight on Vancouver Island. I don't think Weyco had any idea of the controversy they were stepping into with that purchase. I still think it was done solely so executives from the mother ship in Tacoma could just go to Vancouver when visiting Canadian headquarters vs. the pain of going into the boondocks interior.

The decking in the article was rhetorical. And I admit I was speaking exclusively of the forests in northwestern California. I have no idea what anyone does in British Colombia.

I don't think anyone defends what they were doing to the redwoods in the 80s and 90s.

But, you know, public opinion changes, policies change and, as it turns out, they have learned a lot about the ecosystem from studying how the clear-cut areas regrow.

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