So is the assumption I was responding to, which assumed that there were trees there to cut down in the first place.

Both the comment you responded to and the comment you made had that kind of assumption. And I'm not replying to what they said...

I wasn't making any normative claims about what the land should be, just pointing out that this process appears to have been afforestation of an area that, prior to this intervention, was grassland, and so the implicit assumption in the original comment that the local water cycle had already been perturbed may be wrong.

I don't think that's what you communicated, actually.