"Since then, while the population of France has doubled, French forests have also doubled. In other words, forest loss decoupled from population."

Meanwhile in France permanent meadow area shrank by 6.3% between 2006 and 2010 and by 3% between 2009 and 2010 alone.

it's ashamed that people who care about environment tend to get obsessed about forest and forget about the rest.

One could say that meadow is not a very common natural state for Europe. Historically it was mostly forest and wetlands... You have figures about what those meadow area are replaced with?

As for the cause, it may be because of the end of EU subsidies to set aside a percentage of the fields...

Historically animals like deer kept meadows open.

Yes, a dense forest is not always good for the native species. Deer or bears, for instance, need these small deforested pockets to survive. I think that was one of the problems of preventing all forest fires. Now, in certain places, there are controlled fires to clear certain parts of forests.

I don't have figures but I guess growing forest are mainly replacing perpetual meadow

That's actually the standard model, at least when I took ecology: there's actually a whole biome described as the "woody invaders". I've never heard of woody retreaters, or grassy invaders.

The author should go to China to see how the environment has been "liberated".

The western world has outsourced pollution to the third world, thinking that it would stop at the borders.

The more I read western news (and make no mistake, I'm a westerner) the more I'm under the impression of reading the "Pravda" back in its glorious days : "sleep well people everything is OK".

The author focuses on land use, and forest area is actually growing in Asia.

http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C56/forests_2012

The bad players are actually South America and Africa wrt deforestation, Oceania is about neutral and forest growing everywhere else.

Total forest cover is a crude statistic. Primary forests in Asia, where the majority of biodiversity resides, continue to be felled at alarming rates.

This article goes against the popular narrative that everything is getting worse and therefore will be an irritant to those who hold that dogma.

The call to action is: we need to move to fish farming not wild caught.

This seems like an odd article given that global warming is not reducing. I hope the article was true, but it doesn't seem so. Adding some forests in Europe is good, but the deforestation is happening in the Amazon and other forests in other parts of the world.

I'm not sure even a 100% forest coverage could deal with the amount of CO2 we dump in the atmosphere currently...