[Kirkwood]

"due to man's intervention, there are more trees than ever"

I know Rush says this a lot, but I think it is one area in which he doesn't know what he's talking about. Go back and read descriptions and surveys by the first explorers of North America. It was basically all forested land east of the Mississippi. Fly over it today and it is mostly agricultural or residential tracts. I've seen dramatic changes in the past 50 years in the community I was raised in where large tracts of timber were cleared and never replanted, but turned into farmland or housing developments. We now see the same thing occurring in Brazil and SE Asia with large areas of forests being harvested and not replanted. I don't think it is an ecological crisis by any stretch of the imagination, but man has changed the face of the land. Sometimes its progress and sometimes it isn't.

[AlexW]

"there are more trees than ever"

I heard this long before Rush mentioned it.
You can not judge by your own observations.
I am sure there is data on the internet that can confirm
one way or the other.

[ClaireSolt]

I am sure that we have vastly increased the land devoted to trees in this country in the last 40 years as we have banked a lot of land that was formerly farmed. this has been an agressive government policy particularily on exhausted cotton land of the SE.

[larryw408]

Better yet, read the recent published material from Stanford that backs up my statement. Comparing the narrowly focused, anecdotal and subjective observations of forestation and vegetation made by early explorers to aeronautical photographs is silly, and a position that has been debunked by the aforementioned study.