http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003May22.html

Headline:

The Last Stand
Very old trees offer a glimpse into our past and clues to our future. But are
they worth saving?

By Steve Nash
Sunday, May 25, 2003; Page W14


Jesse Overcash holds an old aerial photo up to the light -- a few square miles
of southwestern Virginia mountains, circa 1935. His finger traces an upfold in
the blanket of forest, near a place called Griffith Knob.

"You can look at the different textures here, and the density of those crowns
of trees -- they're part of a continuum," he says. The rarest part of it, in
fact. A darker stretch near the bottom of the image suggests the canopies of
big, and very old, trees.

A career biologist at the Blacksburg outpost of the U.S. Forest Service,
Overcash has a professional interest in these relic forests, whittled over the
last couple of centuries to wisps of habitat for a rich variety of wildlife. He
knows their value to science, and to the lumber mill. In the khaki uniform of
federal forestry, with a country-western twang and a taste for fresh venison,
Overcash is no stereotypical tree-hugger. But he is not immune to the mystery
and the melancholy of the lost forests of the mid-Atlantic, where trees were 10
stories tall and as wide as two men lying head to toe.

"The first thing is, I just like big trees," says Overcash. "If I could come
back, I would like to come back when there were forests of them. Imagine seeing
a 12-foot-diameter white oak!"

When Overcash's career with the Forest Service began in the '80s, there was
little official reverence for old growth, often referred to as "decadent" --
past its prime as marketable timber and overdue for harvest. Two events nudged
him out of the mainstream. The first was the agency's approval of a logging
operation in an old grove.

"I tell you what," he begins. "We cut a stand here just because we could back
in '89 that irritated me to death. It was some beautiful white oak. I said,
let's don't cut this, and we did anyway. And from that day on, it was -- all
right, I'm not going to relent on this issue."

Around that time, Overcash came across boxes full of Depression-era aerial
photos ... (cont)