BTW, elsewhere I just read that the amount of forests in England has now recovered above the levels recorded in Domesday Book (William Conqueror's land survey in 1086).

Same's happening in many countries in Europe. I have a picture of my birth home, taken in 1903 from a nearby hill. The landscape is mostly bare, almost everything except the actual fields is used for cattle. Now you can't take a picture like that. Almost everything is covered by a forest, but you can't see it from the trees growing on the hill.