Harvesting (the pine timber on the 50-acre lot next to Balsamea) is one thing. It’s another thing to kill thousands — maybe millions — of other trees and myriad other things living above and below ground to get that harvest, and leave the forest ugly, sick, and disgraced. When it’s a forest you knew well, and which truly is now no more, an alien thing left in its place, it’s the kind of thing that can almost make you wish your eyesight was now no more, too.
Forest immersion can do that to you, as it must have done to Thoreau:
The Balsamean 