If you watch the video about the Ghost Forest you can see that the Pine Barrens of New Jersey where the dying trees were harvested is actually still pretty majestic. There are 1,164,025 acres of protected forest in the Pinelands National Reserve which was established in 1978, with over 850 species of plants and many species of animals including bears and bobcats. Anyone in NYC that wanted to see it for themselves could easily make a day trip out of it.

New York State now has a forest cover of 62.88% incidentally, and the Catskills and Adirondacks are also pretty doggoned majestic. New York City itself has over 7 million trees and a 21% forest cover, since the outer buroughs are quite green. The area is far from being turned into a treeless wasteland, so much so that a fake one was created.