> It doesn't take thousands of years to develop a forest. Trees grow rapidly. Except it does, and they don't, because that's literally what makes old-growth fo

> It doesn't take thousands of years to develop a forest. Trees grow rapidly. Except it does, and they don't, because that's literally what makes old-growth forest so important and so rare. A forest is not "a field of trees", when we call something a forest we're talking about the complete, fully established, stable ecosystem that makes up a forest. And an old-growth forest is one where the trees took hundreds of years to grow (old growth trees do not grow fast) with a floor composed of biomass accumulated over many generations of vegetation, requiring -surprise- thousands of years. Fields of trees only take 10~15 years to stand up, so you can log them. Which is why we do that. Actual forests take a hell of a lot longer to create, usually a few generations of humans. Except for old-growth forest: we can't create those, we die way too quickly. By the time a single generation of old-growth trees have done a cycle, it's anywhere from 150 to several thousand years later. If you've never seen old growth forest: imagine a huge, adult tree, so wide two people can't even put their arms around it. Good job: you just imagined a toy tree compared to old-growth forest, so let's do this again: Imagine a car. Then imagine a single-car garage built around that car. Then imagine a fantasy-world tree that is so big, the entire garage fits inside that tree. That is what old-growth forest is. Those weren't fantasy trees, that's what our forests used to look like. It used to be everywhere. Now, there is almost none of it left, and no one should ever be allowed to log it.