That's the problem.
Had the shuttle been orbiting 120 years ago, when the primary source of power was coal and wood, would the view from space be better or worse?
120 years ago the human population was about 1 billion, today it's about 6 billion (off the top of my head but pretty close I think)...but our technology allows us to be much more efficient in the use of resources. Opposing trends but my guess is that environmental damage is much more severe today.
Thank you for illustrating the main objection to this woman so perfectly. There is a time and place for everything, specially opinions.
Science is not about guessing.
They actually cleared all that land in order to plant crops. Today we grow probably 100 times more crops on an acre of land then we did back 200 years ago, so the need for as much cleared land has gone down remarkebly. There have certainly been places where it was cleared for railroad ties and wood energy, and there is no doubt it did damage from which we recovered as soon as it was allowed to grow back. The problem is, the astronauts look at cleared land and automatically decide it is damage. That then gets passed on as gospel and we pass a lot of absurd laws that do nothing but hurt the poorest in our society. We now have more trees in the United States than we did 200 years ago, so the argument that clearing jungle timber is doing permanent damage to the environment is not proven. We need better data than just the observations of astronauts.