Standing by stacked 16-foot logs that hours earlier were 100-foot Norway spruce, foresters tried to explain why cutting down these old trees was an essentially green activity.
Slender, bespectacled Paul Trotta framed the counterintuitive crux of the matter this way: "How are you going to regenerate this forest so you have trees on the landscape that keep growing and sequester carbon and hold the world together?"
The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization defines sustainable forestry as stewardship that maintains biodiversity, productivity and regeneration capacity and potential for ecological, economic and social functions.
The foresters' answer is to manage them carefully, taking nature's cues and a long view.
Last week, nearly all of New York's timberland labeled working forests _ 755,000 state-owned acres _ were re-certified green for the second year by independent auditors for the Sustainable Forestry Initiative Inc. That means a random sample met SFI standards for limited logging, replanting and protecting streams, wetlands, soils and habitats.
In programs that have developed over the past 20 years, about half of North America's timberlands now have some environmental seal of approval, compared with 10 percent globally.
But on the ground, it's not always a pretty sight.
Down an old dirt road in New York's Southern Tier, past mixed hardwoods and white pines, lined with remnants of stone fences from failed farms of the previous two centuries, logger Randy Wood fired up his chain saw and quickly dropped another towering spruce, trimmed its branches and sectioned it into logs. Alone, he was clear cutting 13 acres planted in 1931 by the Civilian Conservation Corps.
He bid almost $29,000 for the job and expects it to take six months, selling logs to Canadian mills for lumber returning to the United States, but now in a softer market with building slowing down. He has to replant next year, and said he might need 2,000 to 3,000 seedlings.
What wasn't immediately obvious was the green ground cover of tiny spruce in much of the denuded expanse. The nonnative trees, originally northern Europeans, were already coming back.
"Nature is prolific," Trotta said, and added that growing trees sequester, or absorb, carbon better than old trees. Heading soon to retirement after 33 years, he is responsible for 14 state foresters in the region. The blacksmith hobbyist and former Boy Scout leader said they don't become foresters because they hate nature or being in the woods. It's just the opposite, he said.
Forester Bob Cross for several years had watched the stand Wood was cutting in the 10,588-acre Burnt Rossman Hills State Forest, part of 24,000 acres he manages, before deciding to cut it. The spruce stood in thin wet soil and were starting to blow down in strong winds, he said, pointing to a few tilting diagonally.
"At some point you have to clear cut," Cross said. In his opinion, managed forests are healthier than those simply left wild, saying you can take out diseased trees or the poorer ones, and like long-term farming you get some return on the trees before they die naturally.
At a year-old clear cut down another country road, a raggedy patch of brush and woody debris purposely left behind were rimmed by distant trees and the Catskills on the eastern horizon. A wooden sign said: "reforestation project." Some people who passed by have called to complain. It will be replanted next spring, like another stand replanted eight years ago and now covered by rows of 10- to 20-foot spruce.
North America's growing forests of the past century or more have been credited by scientists with absorbing as much as half of the manmade carbon that otherwise would be in the atmosphere. But they've matured, and at a certain point forests absorb less, trees die, and they reach a balance.
Most of New York state, about 62 percent or 18.3 million acres, is now forested, Trotta said. In the 1830s, when this thin soil west of the Catskills was cleared, the total was only 12 percent. Agriculture was tough on nature.
The Department of Environmental Conservation administers 3 million acres of state-owned forest preserve in the Adirondacks and Catskills where New York's Constitution forbids lumbering in response to widespread clear cutting in the Adirondacks a century ago.
Another 770,000 acres of state working forest are logged, and virtually all of it _ 755,000 acres including Burnt Rossman _ were re-certified "green" a year ago, after having the designation and then losing it for five years, and then re-inspected last week.
Nearly 650,000 acres of private lands are also covered by state conservation easements, which allow only green logging.
Neil Woodworth, executive director of the Adirondack Mountain Club, called SFI and Forest Stewardship Council certifications "real guarantors" of practices that result in healthy, sustainable forests. The state has both. "You can fly over forests that are maintained to those standards and sometimes it's hard to distinguish them from forests that aren't managed," he said.
The SFI said it has certified 150 million acres of North American timberlands since 1994 or almost 18 percent. Consumers can find SFI labels on paper and wood products. Other groups have certified another 34 percent.
Globally, the Forest Stewardship Council said in 79 countries it has certified 7 percent of productive forests worldwide. The organization grew out of a 1990 meeting of timber users, traders and environmentalists.
"It certainly began trying to protect the rain forest and protect indigenous people," said Dave Forness, chief of the state DEC's Bureau of Land Management. The agency is cutting about 1 percent of its working forests annually, using contractors, and could double that "on a sustainable basis," he said.
One issue is staffing. In an audit last year, state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said the DEC was cutting only about half of what it had identified as "the optimum amount of sustainable harvesting," losing potential timber revenue. Adding 17 foresters would net $3.7 million, he said.
There are broader environmental concerns about the Northeast's forests.
"There's a lot of questions about how much more carbon they can suck out of the atmosphere," said Charles Canham, forest ecologist at the Cary Institute for Ecosystem Studies in the Hudson Valley. "It's a problem of the sink is full."
Another concern is turning trees into biofuels, or into waste, the ultimate fate of paper and many wood products, releasing the carbon again.
On the ground, they're daily and ongoing management questions. "It's all about regeneration," Forness said, "and thinking about the next forest."