Sorry, but old growth tropical rainforests can NEVER grow back.  These forests have evolved over 200 million years, because the tropics are not subject to ice ages.  Once destroyed, these forests are gone forever.  Whatever grows back will not be the same.

Grist has repeatedly printed this falsity and I wish it would stop.  You're supposed to be an environmental advocacy medium, please act like it!

Why would it be different from places such as New England where once cut forests have regrown once given the opportunity?

As I said, there are no ice ages in the tropics.  Therefore, the rainforests have evolved over a period of approximately 200 million years.  I guess they might grow back in that amount of time, but that's a long time even in geological terms and humans certainly won't be around by then even if we weren't destroying life as we know it, which we are.

There's also another factor is old growth tropical rainforests: because they've been there so long without interruption, the soils are almost completely depleted of nutrients.  Plants grow out of other plants, not out of the ground.  So in order to grow back, the nutrients that were depleted will have to be replaced.  I've never studied this, so I have no idea how long that would take, but I think we could reasonably presume that it would be a very long time.