However, this from Mother Nature News:
In the United States, which contains 8 percent of the world's forests, there are more trees than there were 100 years ago. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), "Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997, forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920." The greatest gains have been seen on the East Coast (with average volumes of wood per acre almost doubling since the '50s) which was the area most heavily logged by European settlers beginning in the 1600s, soon after their arrival.
In 1865 New Hampshire was 20% forested. We were a farming state. The White Mountain National forest had all been logged.
A hundred and twenty years later NH is 80% covered in forest.
All the smart farmers moved to Ohio, Indiana and Iowa. Too many rocks here. The forests of New England are Chris crossed with old stone walls that the farmers of the 1700s to 1800s piled up using horses and oxen. All three properties I have owned in southern NH had stone walls on at least one to three sides. Some rocks literally the size of a Vw bug.
What is becoming more prevalent is that existing house lots are being logged again. The last twenty years we have had several ice storms. People have begun to realize that you do NOT want hundred foot tall pine trees twenty feet from your house.
I have TWELVE acres. I logged about eight of it two years ago.
We took five trucks of logs and four vans of chips off the property. This house was built in 1972. They cleared just enough to build the house. I had hundred year old pines and oaks within fifteen feet of the house. The house was dark all the time. Not anymore.
I think it was a fad in the 70s and 80s to leave the trees real close. Stupid hippies. Now, people have come to realize that you really do not want anything bigger than an ornamental within fifty feet of your house. At least here in NH. Sometimes those big trees come crashing down in the winter.
The problem is unless you have a bunch, like me it costs thousands of dollars if you do not have room to drop them and you need a crane.
In the greater Lake Tahoe area between California and Nevada, most of the forests were cut down during the gold rush days in the mid-1800s. Most of what you see there now is new growth over the last hundred years.