We really need to have different words for different stages of forest, because people think of a forest with tall trees you can walk through as “restored/rehabilitated” habitat even though all the trees in it are Baby. So many people have never actually seen a mature forest—and old forests have unique characteristics and complexity that young ones don’t.

So many species definitely went extinct when we clear cut the Eastern USA.

The time it takes to get to something you would call “woods” is shorter than people think. If you stop maintaining a plot of land when you’re 20, you will have “woods” by the time you’re 40.

I think we both focus on old growth forests too much and not enough. We need to preserve old growth forests, but we shouldn’t count young forests as a casualty or as replaceable either.

I think a big reason why we have so many hostile, lifeless spaces like big swathes of unused lawn grass is that people see “nature” as already “gone” from there—the damage is “already done.”

And I’ve noticed that few people are studying the ecology of these spaces, because nothing could possibly be of value to study in a weedy lawn or a parking lot, right?

But…well, okay, there’s this myth that conservation is all, like, preserving these places like old-growth forests that are being increasingly encroached upon—I mean it’s in the name, conservation—and as a result, people don’t really look at their “developed” surroundings and see something that is a potential site for a restored ecosystem, instead of something already gone to be mourned over. But the conservation victories of the 70’s and 80’s involved turning a lot of poisonous wastelands into the beginnings of pristine ecosystems, and people who don’t know any better will look at these habitats that used to be a smoking crater of capitalist destruction and think “Awww how sad that there are so few of these untouched habitats left…”

The idea of “untouched” nature is its own lie that has a billion problems with it, but that’s another post