This logging project will ensure that the state will cash in on timber sales and the public will be denied experiencing the splendor of old-growth forest here for another 300 years.

How is it these folks can find a thousand reasons for lumbering — "overcrowding," "insect infestation," "need for open habitat for deer and other edge-feeders" (as though there were a shortage of deer) — but cannot find a single reason to allow any significant (read "commercially viable") tract in their care to attain old-growth status?

Professor Rene Germain said, "We do not have a shortage of trees," but we do have an absence of the type of hardwood forest that wowed the pioneers and sustained hundreds of species dependent on that multi-aged mix of massive mature trees, standing snags, fallen decaying trees, open swathes carved by windfalls and fires, and thick stands of young trees competing to replace the old that only develops with time, lots of time — about 300 years, at least. The varied tree sizes and ages provided the antithesis of the bleak, dark, forage-less desert that pro-lumbering types invariably describe to those who never saw the real thing.

It is no tree farm that draws millions of tourists to gaze awestruck at the giants of Smokey Mountain National Park; nor is it an "overgrown" tangle choked with briars, or a dark morass in need of the kind of "regeneration" our local experts would provide. Nature created that beauty all by herself, and would that we give her the chance to amaze future generations in Putnam County.

Henry Hild, Bronxville