There is the superior quality of old-growth timber and the fact that the material is environmentally sound, since it involves no new logging.

The near exhaustion of old-growth timber has sent the price of wood soaring and the quality of what is available into decline.

In the last 50 years, the agency sold off most of the reservation's old-growth timber in contracts with private industry.

In the first place, the supplies of old-growth timber are diminishing.

When it was owned by Georgia Pacific, the mill relied on old-growth timber from national forests.

The burgeoning environmental movement also restricted access to public lands, where most old-growth timber existed.

But nobody expects these substitutes to ever sell for as little as the old-growth timber harvested in the 1980's.

It directed the Government to lift all environmental laws in a few areas so that some old-growth timber could be cut.

They say more than 600 million board feet of mostly old-growth timber will be cut.

But the key paragraph of the rider dealing with the old-growth timber was never changed.