Sustainable may just be another 'buzzword'. Lets face it, the trees are gonna be around alot longer than we are. This doesn't give us the right to hammer the resource, but it has been shown repeatedly that nature can look after itself regardless of what we do. We might screw it up in the meantime, but not in the long run.
In 1895, Morley Roberts decribes what it was like to walk thru a Redwood forest in his book, "The Western Avernus."
'And suddenly the path grew level, and I came out in the aisle of a forest cathedral.
I was in the Redwoods, the most majestic of all trees, save their elder brethren, the gigantic sequoias.
These were huge and solemn, some ten feet and more in diameter at the butt, rising bare of branches to two hundred feet above me, where they spread out in thick crowns, that darkened yet more the obscure and misty air of night.
My road still ran thru the redwoods, and if they were solemn and weird at night, they were more beautiful in the daytime.
These had grown for so many centuries, and had such great life in them, they were so grand and solemn and king-like, that I felt they had personality.
It seemed nothing short of murder to hew and saw them down for planks and post-making, for house-building, and shelter for little men, who lusted to destroy them in an hour the slow, sweet growth of their unnumbered years.
But men come and destroy them, as barbarians in the pathetic, silent senate-house, and nature lies wounded and bleeding.'
(Crescent City)
