They paved over paradise and put up a parking lot.

Many, many species disappeared from the earth then, but the one thing that never disappeared was the drive of evolution. New species arose, and the new species were even more successful in covering the planet than the former ones. Then another great extinction. Then another recovery. On and on. Change after change, sometimes separated by hundreds of millions of years, and sometimes by only tens of millions of years. Only tens of millions of years? Ha! When I stand next to a tree that is four hundred years old, it stretches my imagination to picture that seed germinating so long ago.

Maloof, Joan. Nature's Temples: A Natural History of Old-Growth Forests Revised and Expanded (p. 12). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 

The tragedy to me is that we are now occupying so much possible forestland with concrete and asphalt and crops and cars and homes and mines and impoundments and the like that the ever-changing forest has fewer places in which to become what it will be next.

Maloof, Joan. Nature's Temples: A Natural History of Old-Growth Forests Revised and Expanded (p. 15). Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition. 

Evolution, we were taught, is about the survival of the fittest and this survival of the fittest depends on the species resilience and its ability to adapt to changing circumstances in its environment. Maloof points out the species extinctions over the millions of years of life on the planet as species disappeared and new ones came to take their place was/is not necessarily a bad thing when you consider the long range evolutionary consequences. In a natural system this idea makes sense  but what happens when human beings interfere and destroy life sustaining resources laying down asphalt and concrete? Can the weeds and trees as easily grow through and can evolution run its natural course?

Joni Mitchell’s song, Big Yellow Taxi, could be the rallying song for the Old-Growth Forest Network