As a whole, U.S. forests are bigger and healthier than they were in 1900, when the country had fewer than 100 million people. Many New England states have as many trees as they had in the days of Paul Revere. Nor was this growth restricted to North America: Europe’s forest resources increased by about 40 percent from 1970 to 2015, a time in which its population grew from 462 million to 743 million.
