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We stopped deforesting the US in 1920. We have more forest here than we did 100 years ago.

• Arubis 7mo ago
  We do in terms of acreage. A lot of that is reclaimed farmland. Old-growth hardwoods are still down overall, and will remain so; that can take multiple hundreds of years to recover, since cleared forests regrow in phases.
  • h2zizzle 7mo ago
    Right. And tree coverage is not the be-all-end-all. My family visited the plantation where a few of our ancestors were enslaved; it had been turned into a state-run forest preserve (partly as a bid for the prior owners to hide the extent of the operation). Unfortunately, the farming practices employed back then have scarred the land; near where one of the slave cabins had stood, we were shown a large anthropogenic ravine that had been created by farming-related soil erosion. These places aren't quite the same forests as they were before European settling. There's also the case of the near-loss of the American Chestnut.
• gnerd00 7mo ago
  Actual facts on the ground do not fit neatly into a one-liner, especially stable forests; this sentence is meant as a one-liner to win bar arguments. source: current graduate research papers in forestry
  • 0xffff2 7mo ago
    Could you maybe give us the 4-5 liner version then?