To begin with, this can be a true statement because the U.S. reached peak deforestation sometime in the 1920's. That is, over 90% of old-growth forests had been logged in the eastern U.S. It's hard to imagine forest cover doing anything but increasing, which it has thankfully been doing steadily for the past 80 years. But steadily does not mean rapidly, and current forest cover is still only about a quarter of total land area of the U.S.

But this fact leads to a number of questions that don't have easy answers: Is that good enough? What is the ideal land cover for the U.S.? Should we go back to pre-colonial levels? Essentially, there's no technical answer for how much forest we need, since that depends upon the priorities of the land owners, both public and private. Still, I'm sure everyone is happy that the figure stands at 24.7% and that the figure is growing every year.

Not all forests are equal in environmental value, though. The forests we've created in the past 80 years are what we can broadly label "young growth" forests. (We'll here take the divide between young and old to be 200 years.) Young growth forests do lots of things we like; they control soil erosion, provide habitat, contribute to biodiversity, provide shade, and soak up Carbon. But they aren't as good as old growth forests in many respects, most notably in habitat. (And if the young growth forests are really just tree plantations, their value is even smaller.)

By definition, it takes a long time to get old growth forests -- at least another 120 years for the land that started to revert to forest in the 1920's. The usefulness (or value) of any such stands will also depends on some things perhaps beyond our control: the size and shape of the stands, how connected they are to other stands, the land uses surrounding those stands, and the protection of those stands from future logging. Simply having more trees doesn't necessarily address any of these concerns, but it probably gets us going in the right direction.

Things are getting better in terms of how much forest we have in the U.S., but we shouldn't ignore that they were once dramatically worse or that they could be much better still. When someone proposes increasing forests or managing them differently, they have a legitimate point, worthy of discussion. I'd say soil erosion in particular is an important consideration. But to try to sweep these issues under the rug with a bromide about how there are more forests today than X years ago is misleading.