You misunderstand. I was writing sarcastically from the view of an envirocultist who thinks every big tree is "old growth". The USFS has a hard cap on harvestable DBH and it has absolutely nothing to do with virgin old growth, second growth, or tree age or health. I obviously don't advocate for wholesale clearcutting of all forests. That's insane. With that said, the true old growth is dying. A combination of refusal to thin old growth out and very aggressive fire suppression has produced decadent stands of huge timber that are worthless at a mill, releasing all their carbon at an accelerated rate, and as dead fuel accumulates are at an ever increasing risk of soil-sterilizing stand-replacement fires. Forests need management or they need to burn naturally and the enviros reeee about either option They've done such a good job of it that no forestry school even knows how to teach the management of old growth forests anymore. On top of that environmental researchers tend to exclude the carbon sequestered by reforestation when they talk about the carbon footprint of forest management.