A couple long retired from the cattle business owns the farm bordering our sheep ranch. Each year, as my wife and I harvest our hay, we look up the hill to our neighbors’ fields and ponder their grass that could be harvested and put to use feeding our livestock.

But their hay is of poor quality and on a steep slope. What we would be willing to pay for the rights to harvest the grass wouldn’t even cover the cost to our neighbors of fertilizer to replace the nitrogen our haying would remove. Whatever small profit we would gain could be had only at the price of long-term loss to our neighbors’ soil productivity.

Thus our neighbors’ grass is left to dry to summer straw, rot in the winter rain and return to the soil from which it sprouts again the following spring. Mountain bluebirds pick through the decaying grass, feasting on the insects and grubs that devour the rot. Bull snakes coil in wait for unwary moles, mice and gophers that gorge on the ripe grass seeds as they fall to the ground. Red-tail hawks eye the grassy landscape below for their next meal.

Like our neighbors’ field, Oregon’s Kalmiopsis Wilderness has been left to the ebb and flow of nature’s cycles. Unlike the field, it is wild country. It is steep, remote and almost absent of the logging roads that jigsaw other Northwest forests.

Two years ago, the Biscuit Fire, the state’s largest in memory, burned through the Kalmiopsis from end to end. Today the burned trees dry in the summer, rot in the winter and replenish the soil. Pileated woodpeckers jackhammer in pursuit of a bounty of wood-eating insects. Ceanothus returns nitrogen to burned soils. Madrone sprouts from meristematic tissue hidden underground, out of fire’s reach. Elk and deer grow fat on the succulent new growth of forbs and herbs. A young forest is being born from the ashes of the old.

The Biscuit Fire kindled not only wood but also debate over the Kalmiopsis’s fate. These remote trees that have died and rotted in retail numbers for millennia are now doing so wholesale. The rush is on to salvage before their purported value is wasted.

The U.S. Forest Service predicts the Treasury will lose millions by logging the more than 500 million board feet of dead timber proposed by the agency’s draft environmental impact statement. The cost to the public of managing these remote lands for timber production is far greater than the salvaged wood is worth.

The public’s loss, however, is the Forest Service’s gain. The Forest Service estimates it can sell the dead wood for about $37 million (not much at 7.5 cents per board foot because loggers will have to use expensive helicopters to remove the dead trees). The Forest Service gets to keep 75 percent of this money for itself to pay employee salaries, office expenses and the like (the rest is paid to local counties). The Forest Service will also use some of the money to pay to rehabilitate the logged lands, and some will be used to subsidize the agency’s expenses of salvaging other worthless dead timber elsewhere in the nation.

The Kalmiopsis was never sufficiently productive to warrant timber management before the Biscuit Fire. Burning the forest does not make the economics any better. Like my neighbors’ pasture, Biscuit should be left to nature’s devices.