In the west of North America, like most places, almost all of the old growth forest was logged.
Some places where the soil and subsoil was particularly vulnerable to erosion and landsliding or just didn't have a lot of water capacity in the first place like on dry mountains, after these trees were removed and most of the soil washed away from rain, the forest simply has not come back a hundred years later. There are little trees gradaually getting started, and lots of mostly bare soil or rock still where erosion from rain is able to outpace the vegetation growth. It will likely take many thousand years for trees to get to the size they were before, and to build up the capacity for holding water like it had been.
In more abundant forests, trees regrow faster. But even there, a hundred years later, the total biomass per acre is often 10% of what it was as old growth forest, and the capacity for holding water on the land similarly much reduced. The old growth forests were the result of nature doing its thing often with help from humans for thousands of years and continually becoming richer. Eventually a major disturbance sets it back, but this might only happen ever 5 or 10 thousand years. This time humans did it.
Even if the Earth has emotions, who are we to assume it would prefer to be covered in throbbing life rather than to have a surface that was burnt to a cinder? Maybe we itch. What we're doing when we talk about a long-term forest recovery is projecting our fantasies about how we would feel if we were the Earth. If we destroy it for ourselves, we've simply destroyed it. We were the ones who assigned value to it.
This is us burning our own house down. The ground that the house is on does not care that we are obviously suicidal.
Is the point that people moving into the American west should have froze to death rather than chop down trees for fire and shelter? The trees had much more utility to humans as fuel than it did as a forest at that moment, and unless you think biomass is an intrinsic good regardless of whether it helps humans, i dont see anything wrong with what happened.
Old growth forest creates more wood per year per acre than second or third growth after the old growth is cut. It also produces more food for humans and habitat for wildlife. It literally stabilizes the weather and pumps moisture inland by storing water and then releasing it. It holds water in the ground so that streams don't go dry and can support fish. It is much more resilient to wildfire.
In the redwood forest for example, 95% of it was clear cut, for a short term benefit. 90% of this wood that had been accumulated by the forest over thousands of years has now burned or rotted away within 100 years, and is gone.
What we're doing now is rapidly consuming everything, and these resources are steadily declining, and will run out and the human population will crash.
But yes, I do think more abundance and diversity of life is an intrinsic good, both for its own sake and for the long term thriving of humans on earth. Like any population of animals, if we consume everything that we live on and undermine the capacity of earth to support us, we will collapse.
That said humans can figure out how to help ecosystems recover and be more abundant. So it's not all over. But clearing the old growth forest is one of the worst things we do - up there with reckless mining that contaminates water.
We tolerate extracting resources from the biosphere because it supports a higher human population. Barring actions that will lead to extinction events, I think we should continue to extract resources from the planet that support human flourishing.
Destroying millions of acres of old growth for cattle farming, which is essentially a luxury for human food, meh.. maybe we’re better off growing cattle in other places that are more suited to it, and eating less beef so that nature in those forests can continue nourishing those parts of the earth.
Some uses of the earth are good for both humans and their environment, and some are good for humans in the short term but at the cost of long-term sustainability.
And if we do things that aren’t sustainable then we use up valuable resources, when doing things in a more balanced way could support and benefit humans indefinitely.
Move on...
Instead, we're depleting resources faster and faster primarily because the people directing most of the world's economic resources want to accumulate even more money even faster. They just don't give a damn about what comes after.
Because the old growth was logged, the fires we have now are often able to kill 100% of the trees in an area because the trees are all small and young and vulnerable. And this is self perpetuating, because after such a fire the soil often erodes, and sun hits the ground directly keeping it dry - it takes a really long time to recover from in some places.
Each cycle of logging removes even more soil and makes the landscape drier, and resets the timer on how long it will be before the forest is able to survive a wildfire. It's a short term thing.
I'm not saying no one should ever cut a tree or use wood - and it can be done in better and worse ways, it's really complex. But in general, the repeated clearcutting of the pacific northwest is steadily degrading that landscape the same way repeated intensive till farming of the prairies is degrading that landscape - it's a relatively short term thing with diminishing returns.