Fran Cafferata’s Feb. 13 guest column, “Working forests offer habitat for wildlife,” is full of pro-timber rhetoric she uses to put a happy face on the impact of industrial logging in Oregon.

Her suggestion that somehow the massive damage to wildlife habitat that is done with each clear-cut is compensated for by companies hiring firms like hers to plant some flowers and attract pollinators is laughable, at best.

Logging companies, regardless of their guilty efforts to atone, will never be able to live down the damage to forests and wildlife they do with every clear-cut.

The only meaningful way to do that would be to completely leave the area afterward, and give it 100 years to return to something like the home the wildlife knew before it was crushed under the tracks of a feller buncher.

Instead, they will return in 25-40 years, destroy the recovering habitat again, and in the meantime repeatedly spray the tree farms they call forests with highly toxic chemicals. Beware of the honey from those clear-cut pollinators.

I don’t begrudge Cafferata’s making a living; certainly hers is a good-faith effort to at least put a bandage on the gaping wounds to nature that the timber industry is guilty of.

ROGER DORBAND

Astoria