[tom hyle]

Interesting. It seems the ships are fairly commonly mentioned, too; I've heard that before. I'm really not on some kind of swords wiped out forests crusade, but swords are the pinnacle of technology at the time, and I would not be the first to see them as drivers fo industrial technology. Certainly there are many factors; mostly all boil down to too many humans.
A bit more folklore about the charcoal burners in postmedieval Europe:
The charcoal burners worked in large wild forests; I don't know who owned or dominated them; perhaps they were "deserts" this is the impression I get. They did not replant that I know of. There is generally no need to replant a small semicleared area in a healthy forest. They did not make charcoal from small stuff, but from large straight trees. Perhaps forest giants so called were off limits to them in theory; in fact the story I've heard is they had little to no official oversight. I've seen in books the structure they built to cook the charcoal; it is a cylinder, about 10-15' tall, very wide proportionally; maybe 40' or something, and is made out of straight logs stacked in a very specific pattern. It is neccessary to use straight logs so as to limit and control the amount of airspace to make the thing work properly. It is then covered with dirt with just enough air let in to sustain fire; not enough to burn up the wood, which thus becomes charcoal.
I'll add also that the people of Europe also traditionally got a great deal of food from their forests, from which their overculture dominators have busily and insistantly seperated them for many years. This is where the whole pigs thing comes full circle, for instance. The traditional way to feed pigs was to drive them into the forest to eat nuts, roots, small animals, etc. Industrial use of the wood has largely outcompeted these uses in modern times, it seems.