I am troubled by what, for some, passes as "better forest management" these days. Laurie Wayburn, president of Pacific Forest Trust (Letters to the Editor, Sept. 17), has it all backward. According to her, Pacific Northwest forests " are among the world's most effective carbon sinks.
When these forests are managed for older-growth conditions, they store two to three times what young forests or tree planting alone can do in the same time period." She cites no scientific source for this information; in fact, recent studies strongly suggest the opposite. In the July 18, 1997, issue of Science, Anne Simon Moffat, reporting from several recent scientific studies by ecologists in the U.S. (e.g. Gregg Marland in the Environmental Sciences division of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee) and from Finland, reports that "actively managed, fast-growing forests that are harvested and replanted can tie up even more carbon than mature, protected forests that are left alone."
It would appear that Ms. Wayburn's arguments in favor of stagnant old-growth forests are unsupportable by the facts and, one might claim, unsustainable. Indeed, the arguments in her letter are typical of the simplistic rationales so prevalent among defenders of the new environmental protectionism.
Timothy La Farge, Marietta, Ga.
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