Old-Growth Forests

Sometimes if people stand too close to the trees for measurement, they don’t get a proper perspective (“Differing Values Cut Through Timber Debate,” April 15).

The forests of the Pacific Northwest have been clear-cut and devastated for millennia by fires, wind, earthquakes, disease, insects and Native Americans. Then they regrew, and perchance some portions became old-growth forests. But the Bureau of Land Management estimates that in 1850 only 40% of the forests west of the Coast Range in Oregon were more than 200 years old (the usual criteria for old-growth). And, to quote Alston Chase: “Preservation policy is a fraudulent quest to create conditions (of stability) that never existed, never will exist and never should exist.”

STUART H. JONES

Claremont