(urth) Urth is Green Redux

[Lee Berman]

>Marc Aramini: yes, but the Lune of Severian's time is bigger, closer, and has an atmosphere.  Is it still the moon?

Damn! I think this is an excellent point!
 
I think postulations of domes and greenhouses are just post-hoc argument fabrications against your theory Marc. In 30 years
of picturing "the forests of Lune" I never once pictured a dome or greenhouse. The word "forest" implies natural growth and
that's how I pictured it. I suspect the same is true of all others but we'll have to see what they claim. 
 
I guess there could be a planetary forcefield to hold in atmosphere...but that would imply Lune has civiliation. And we get NO sense of that in BotNS IIRC. I get the sense that if anything, green Lune has gone wild, gone to seed, so to speak.
 
Arguments of "difficulty"  regarding the increase in size of Lune also fall flat in my book. Great glass domes and lunar volume expansion are both equally easy to create in fiction, Wolfe can do what he wants with his worlds. Forest implies atmosphere and atmosphere implies bigness. Damn...maybe Lune has been planet sized all this time.
 
 We still have the possibility that Urth is not in the same universe as Earth. Perhaps Urth's satellite was always bigger than
our Moon, more like a twin planet. It could be a literary tip of the hat to 5HoC all along. (this implies the astronaut picture
is not from Urth's history but, like certain stories, from Earth)
 
Well, that's how I see it.  From my perspective, this argument of Lune's atmosphere and size makes "Whorl as Lune" become lower probability. But it makes "Urth= Green" and "Lune (full-sized and forested, previously flooded) = Blue" a greater possibility.