Everybody commenting on this piece, including the author himself, is relying on a vocabulary rendered obsolete by both 100+ years of industrial logging AND climate change. 

Here's an example. The two competing sides of the debate over wild lands are conservation and preservation, as has been true ever since John Muir and Gifford Pinchot fought it out during TR's time. The conflict between conservation and preservation, however, is based on certain assumptions that no longer hold true. 

The main obsolete assumption is that the remaining old growth forest will retain high levels of fire resilience and biodiversity no matter how much of it cut and "replaced"--the concept of replacement itself is absurd--by monoculture tree plantations managed for maximum yield.

As more and more "replacement" has happened, however, the concept of preservation has shifted from preservation of intact old growth biospheres to preservation of old tree plantations that have very little "nature" about them.