>>185383I know the feel OP, big time.
I've done a lot of work in forests in Canada surrounding logging (more on the biological monitoring, planning and conservation side of things).
Yeah, we need lumber and pulp, but we can be easily be doing a lot more to more effectively manage our shared resources and be less destructive to forest ecosystems. In some places we're making improvements, but then we have a long way to go.
I too can't help but feel like eventually all (almost) of the old growth forests I love will be gone. If they're in the rotation they will go. And almost always it isn't in the economic interest of forestry companies to let forests get to "old growth" status. Their economic cut date is decades before that. So, we end up with landscapes missing a critical forest type. Is that what we want?
It's not about hippies and tree huggers, not exclusively anyways. I'm fortunate to be both an American and a Canadian and have lived in various places in both countries. Though the US has some beautiful wild areas (especially in Alaska) you just can't get lost in the natural world in quite the same way as you can in Canada's vast land. I've also lived in Britain. There's some great spots there too, but the population density is so high comparatively and so few places remain that haven't been moulded by man in some way.
I've also visited logging sites in tropical rainforest.
Untouched forests and rivers and lakes make me feel alive in a way that heavily human altered landscapes simply cannot.
