My colleague Alex Tabarrok notes that since the 1870s, forestation in Vermont has risen from 20% to 85%. He correctly notes that part of this is tremendous increases in agricultural productivity, reducing the need for farm land.
Don’t forget, however, the effect of the invention of cars, which dramatically reduced demand for horses–and the need to clear open pastures for horse grazing, thereby permitting reforestation. In addition, wood used to be a primary source of fuel, so the turn toward fossil fuels and away from wood reduced the demand for chopping down trees to burn them. Of course, the discovery that petroleum could be used to produce energy also saved the whales from extinction and eliminated the rivers of manure that used to flow through American cities.
There’s always tradeoffs…
Update:
A reader reminds me that I forgot about the pastureland for hay:
I live in Wilton, Connecticut, which is about 55 miles from NYC. It’s
hilly, with houses on 2-acre lots (the minimum required for septic systems
and wells) and lots and lots of trees and and forests and stone walls
running through the forests. Pictures of Wilton from 1900 tell a different
story – those stone walls border huge pastures. For miles and miles, both
down in the Norwalk River valley and up in the hills, there were vast fields
of hay and no trees. The hay, of course, was grown for the horses in New
York City. You already know the rest of the story.
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