ABSTRACT
To silviculturalists in particular, the New Forestry was a step backward. Its focus on biological legacies put too much emphasis on continuity and could lead to diminishing the forest's resilience to disturbance. But in one important respect the New Forestry was novel: its values represented a fundamental break with scientific tradition. Recognizing evolution to be chaotic and random, silviculturalists believed that there was no condition that plant communities "ought" to be in. The logic of the ecosystem had come full circle: the belief that nature was organized into systems had led to suppositions that nature is directional. This encouraged a bias toward stability and old growth, which in turn encouraged the belief that "ecosystem health" has intrinsic value. Following this logic, the New Forestry preached that timber harvests were justified only insofar as cutting contributed to forest fitness. With the advent of the New Forestry, the latent teleology of the ecosystem idea became manifest.
