"I think there is a big difference between a stack of lumber and a tree."
Yeah. A tree is what you huddle under when it's cold and raining, waiting for the rain to work through the leaves and start that heavy dripping.
A stack of lumber is a house.
I still think a lot of environmentalists would get a different view of life if they were forced to spend a winter on the North Dakota plains in a skin tent. Native Americans knew damn well it was them or the buffalo, and until they had horses, they used to kill them by driving herds off cliffs and picking out what little they could take with them out of the heap of corpses.
Ever clean a buffalo hide?