To the Editor:
In "Ducking the Environment" (editorial, Sept. 6), you say there's no reason why the United States cannot save its old-growth forests. You cannot "save" the forests. They are called "old growth" precisely because they are old. They are growing slowly and they are dying. Like any living thing, trees do not live forever.
As Gifford Pinchot, father of the United States Forest Service, said, conservation means "wise use." If we try to save the forests, they will finally be lost to us.
As a summer worker in western forests during my undergraduate years in the late 40's, I saw only areas of virgin timber and sky. But quite a few trees had died and fallen down. More would follow. The only way to harvest these trees is clear cutting, messy as it seems in photographs.
Visiting one of the first clear-cut areas 18 years later, I discovered new young, vigorous trees so thick it was difficult to walk through them. Still the Forest Service went overboard in clear cutting, mostly because of political pressure. JOHN KALAFUS Washington, Conn., Sept. 8, 1992