The French exploited the resource and left it a country of stumps

...and for other rotten, imperial activities.

But France, like Chevron-Texaco (which despoiled an area of rainforest the size of Rhode Island, with toxic mud from oil drilling, and lost the lawsuit that 30,000 Indigenous tribespeople brought against them), are not likely gonna pay the poor anything but more grief.

Countries act like corporations. Corporations act like countries. That is our world--a world of injustice that we can't seem to do anything about--though the Latin Americans and especially the South Americans are making great progress on the assertion of social justice and the curtailment of transglobal corporate power. We need to look to them for the lessons on how to do it. (One of them is hard civic work on honest, transparent elections!)

I mean all of the Americas were completely unspoiled wilderness essentially. Most of the US east of the Mississippi was cleared. There is more forest cover now than there was 100 years ago in the eastern US.

Forestry is both harvesting and managing forests. I don't think that was much of an issue back 500+ years ago with the relatively small population of Tainos that inhabited the islands. they are all gone, just like most of the forests.

nt