The punishments were very severe--like having your entrails dragged out of you and circled round a tree stump, or being inflicted with unquenchable hunger. These persistent stories, throughout the world, likely reflect the knowledge of ancient farmers that the fertility of the soil and the coming of life-giving rains were intimately linked to preservation of the local forest. They may not have had scientific instruments to measure it, but they had eyes to see and strong intuitions about Nature based on generations of experience, passed down from parent to child. Cut down your local forest and your crops fail.
It is not an obvious connection to most modern people, so we have to "study" it and measure it, and write reports about it--and then fight for the truth of those reports against global corporate predator agriculture and their P.R. firms.
The "obvious" thing to most modern people is that you need to cut down trees so that the sunlight can reach the crops. But that is simplistic and in many respects untrue. Elements of the air, soil and water--and biological elements such as bees, birds, fish and other creatures, and trees (for instance, as windbreaks for the crops, home to beehives, and both nearby and distant upslope stabilizers of the soil)--need to work
together in a complex ecosystem. Thick, tall, closed-canopy forests actually
attract rain and create clouds and fog (the ancient redwood forest being the most dramatic example). Trees hold the soil in the ground, prevent floods that rip off the topsoil (the most fertile layer) and are
obviously cool places where moisture accumulates. Cut down enough trees and you have created a desert and it never recovers.
There is a great book on the history of forests and humankind, by John Perlin, called, "A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization," that chronicles the story of the loss of this ancient wisdom, with the rise of shipbuilding, construction of great palaces and cities, glass blowing, forges for metalworks and all the forest-decimating activities that create what we call "civilization." The book starts with the story of Gilgamesh, and states the following about Gilgamesh's ambitious building plans which required huge quantities of timber: "Fortunately for Gilgamesh a great primeval forest lay before him. It extended over such a great area of land that no one in Urak knew its true size.
That such vast tracks of timber grew near southern Mesopotamia might seem a flight of fancy considering the present barren condition of the land, but before the intrusion of civilizations an almost unbroken forest flourished in the hills and mountains surrounding the Fertile Crescent."
Gilgamesh proceeded to cut down the forest and kill the forest's god protector, despite strong religious taboos. The story of Gilgamesh ends with the punishment of Urak for the destruction of the "abode of the Gods"--drought!
This is the prototype "sacred grove" story, that is repeated in endless variation throughout the world. The essential functions of Nature--essential to all life and essential to human survival--are made "sacred," and deified, and those functions of Nature are protected from overuse or destruction by the worship that accrues to them. One of those functions is the connection between forests and good crops.
There are few people left in the world who still understand the relationship between protection of ALL ecosystems and the production of good, healthy, nutritious food in sufficient abundance to serve local needs. At one time everybody knew this, but that knowledge has vanished with urbanization. These are the indigenous farmers, worldwide--in Latin America, Asia and other places--"first world" organic farmers (a new movement) and a few remnants of ancient farming knowledge in places that especially value good food--such as Italy and France. The globalization of food --with its Frankenfoods, frozen foods, genetically modified foods and seeds, pesticide-poisoned food, etc.--practices which deplete soils and destroy ecosystems (especially devastating when combined with corporate logging)--is being rivaled by the worldwide organization of campesinos (indigenous and organic farmers) who posses the ancient farming wisdom from generations of experience, or who have acquired that wisdom through study. Localized food production is a major tenet of this movement. Local farmers generally understand and respect local ecosystems. And the bigger and more distantly managed the farming becomes, the less respect there is for natural ecosystems.
Buying strawberries from Chile in Los Angeles means that the strawberries have been genetically modified to survive the trip, or, at the least, are polluting the air and contributing to global warming with jet transport, and have often been grown big, fat, red and perfect-looking by poisoning everything around them, including the chemically fertilized soil they grow in. Strawberries picked out of your own garden or greenhouse, or a few miles away from you, are much more reliably organic and not likely to be harmful to anything or anybody. It is virtually impossible to know what is happening to the ecosystems in Chile or Thailand, when you buy nature's products from such distant producers. Globalized food producers--big, multinational corps--not only deliberately destroy local "ancient wisdom" farmers, they try to keep you ignorant about what they are doing, through the sheer distances to the food source and extensive propaganda.
A good source of information on the worldwide struggle against corporate farming is www.foodfirst.org. And here's an excellent article I happened upon about the Bari tribe in eastern Colombia and their efforts to protect ancient agricultural methods. One telling paragraph:
“'Our relationship (between the Bari and non-native campesinos) has improved considerably. The campesinos have been conscious of why we’re in this struggle, because the Barí are defending their territory,' Barí cacique Jaime said in an interview. 'We’ve also explained that the Barí are not just the Barí, as we say, "the Barí are the Barí, but the other half of the Barí is the land." The majority of campesinos want to coexist, to share this space together, and are conscious that the land is the fruit that provides all to everyone, for campesinos as for us.’”http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2009/07/17/an-unlikely-alliance-indigenous-and-campesinos-build-an-alliance-for-self-defense-by-andrew-willis-garces/ 
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