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Take a look at the Amazon rain forest, 22% gone. Bangladesh, 44% gone, on and on. World wide deforestation is commonplace.

I'm sure in the Eastern US and most defiantly in Europe, the percentages were far higher -- probably 60 - 80% respectively.

It is well known that American deforestation caused the dust bowls

This, I have to disagree with. The 1920s dust bowel was a result of farming on land that nature intended to be covered with thick layers of prairie grass sod, combined with a cyclical multi-year drought. Dry soil (little or no irrigation capability back then) that had no protective covering of sod mixed with typical prairie winds, makes a dust bowl.

A hundred years earlier (when there no farming on the plains, and no trees to speak of either) there would not have been a dust bowl, but raging prairie grass fires instead. But the sod would have kept the soil from blowing away. Deforestation had absolutely nothing to do with the dust bowl.

I agree that the functional source for the dust bowls was the loss of the dense prarie grass root structure, OK, we plowed it up. However, as we were doing so, we also deforested the scrub trees, western pines and cedars, cottonwoods and all other trees that grew in the prairie.

The homesteaders cut them down for firewood and buildings and fences. Those trees and treebreaks would have greatly dimished the dust bowls. Where treebreaks were enforced by law in Minnesota and Iowa from the 1860's on and later in N and S Dakota, the dustbowls ended.

Treebreaks would have minimized the dustbowls and protect the Midwest from them now.

Many of my relatives remember having to leave S Dakota once the trees were gone.

The laws on treebreaks are still enforced rigidly in the northern prairie.