What is it about trees, that obsess some people so much?
God and nature decided the best places on earth to have trees, and so trees sprung.
God and nature did not decide the whole earth was to be treed.
I give you the example of the largest man-made forest in the world, in the Sandhills of Nebraska, created by one of these "naturalists" who thought he knew better than God and nature, where trees belonged. The forest is a little under a hundred years old, and has burned down in its entirety three times; in both combatting the infernos and replanting the forest, taxpayers have been bled dry. The forest consists of long-needled pine trees, whose refuse is harmful to the composition of the soil of the Sandhills.
Trees are fine where trees belong--and by the way, there's plenty of trees in Nebraska, despite public perception, probably more trees in Nebraska than in Ohio or Indiana--but trees are not fine where they don't belong.
Omaha, a major city in the United States, at one time had tons and tons of trees in both residential and industrial areas of the city, planted there by effete easterners who first settled the city circa 1860-1880, who thought Nebraska should look more like New England. More trees than people, more trees than cattle, more trees than fish in the Missouri River.
During the early and mid 1970s, some sort of disease killed those trees, and Omaha today has considerably fewer trees than it did forty years ago. Some places in Omaha might as well be in northern Nevada, given the lack of trees, which used to be so commonplace they crowded out lawns and parks.
I suspect that naturally-occurring disease was God's and nature's way of telling the good people of Omaha, "Trees don't belong here; the soil, the climate, aren't adapted for trees, so leave well enough alone."
