The meadows have been turned into forests and to a lesser extent pastures.
It's not a few percent, it's 30% of the land, probably more in Germany where there are much lest forests than in Sweden.
The bio-diversity in a meadow strikes me as much higher than heavily grazed pastures or a mono-culture wheat fields or pine forest.
This is mostly clearly seen on the east coast because most of the Midwest is still used for farming.
Edit: in Europe this is visible in coppiced forests. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coppicing . Haven't seen one here in the US but I assume they're somewhat common in Europe where they were an early and effective method of sustainable forestry.
Weyerhaeuser, etc. grow those fast growing pulpwood trees and harvest.
The comparison between relatively preserved parks and National Forests (e.g. Willamette) and the rest of the states forests is truly jarring.
For that matter, the same pattern can be seen across the country. Much of Pennsylvania is densely forested, but the entire state has only a few thousand scattered acres of old-growth woods.
I think you mean "before Native Americans arrived". One of the side effects of the European arrival to North America was reforestation due to a disease-driven decline in the population of Native Americans.
But the case in point was that the countryside has changed considerably because of changes in agriculture.
Something that bothers me is the gristly, meager attitude of a certain type of conservation ecology. I think we are really going to start having to cultivate healthy ecosystems from the ground up, regardless of who's originally "from here" or not. I'm very optimistic about permaculture and wild cultivation techniques. I think they deserve more of a shot than people often give them.
And that "ag-tech" oligopoly has gotta go, along with its foolish, ignorant, exploitative approaches to ecology and economics alike.
European deforestation was most extreme during the late middle ages and early modern period. When people were using wood for fuel in a growing economy, before switching to coal, major European nations were running out of trees. Coppicing was adopted out of a desperate need for basic resources.
Now look what Nestle/other food giants, but also slaughterhouses and animal farms, do: they use groundwater with private wells, and they extract more water than can be replenished... boom.
All these wild weeping willow which had been a signature of Masovian landscape and which I still remember from childhood visits to family farm died soon thereafter. So did the frogs. It is like coming to different country now.