In the age of sail, navies did maintain forests for building future ships. Often trees were specifically grown into shapes needed for strongly curved parts of the hull, because bending of large timbers was difficult to impossible, and parts built up out of multiple timbers were always weaker than single timbers in the right shape. If you wanted to severely limit an enemy's future capability to project power, all you had to do was to set fire to their naval lumber stockpiles and uproot their naval forests.