Forest land is rapidly disappearing throughout the world. It is being cut down for timber or cleared to make way for mines, ranches, farmland, and other human uses. Across the globe, forest ecosystems are being destroyed at a rate of one acre each and every second, and tropical forests are shrinking by 14 million hectares per year. (Thompson & Hickey, 2008, p. 563)
The world’s rainforests cover around 2 billion acres, or 7% of the Earth’s total land surface. (Macionis, 2009, p. 474) This includes not just tropical rainforests like the Amazon that people typically think of when they hear the word, but also cold climate rainforests like those in the Northwest Pacific region. Unfortunately, the world’s rainforests are now less than half their original size, and continue to shrink by at least 1% (75,000 square miles) each year, or around an acre per second. (ibid) A 2006 estimate by the UN Food & Agriculture Organization found that 80% of the world’s primary forest (defined as tropical, temperate and boreal) is already gone. (Bodley, 2015, p. 184)
Deforestation is a longstanding human problem. You can find evidence of ancient civilizations whose downfall was brought about by excessive deforestation, from the doomed inhabitants of Easter Island to Native American societies in Central America who cut down their forests to fuel the production of an aesthetic glaze.
Many areas, especially Europe, have already endured large-scale destruction of woodlands and marshes that occurred during the expansion of agriculture in the medieval period. “In many parts of China, India, and the Mediterranean islands, forests virtually vanished. In transalpine Europe, the United States, and some other areas, they were greatly reduced.” (Domosh et al., 2013, p. 302)
Even though extensive deforestation is an ongoing process that began to accelerate several hundred years ago, “the industrial revolution drastically increased the magnitude of the problem. In just the last half century, a third of the world’s forest cover has been lost.” (ibid, p. 335)
Many people don’t appreciate the extent to which our own country has been deforested, but if you could survey the country in 1600 and do so again today, much of the landscape would look unrecognizable. The mighty redwood forests of California, a treasure unlike anything else in the world, were once many times their present size. Much of what is now the Eastern plains used to be forested, as did much of the Mideast and east coast, which is now mainly cities and prairies with a speckling of trees in between. Forests were cleared away for farmland, urban sprawl, and to supply the wood for construction and firewood.
As early as the 1870s, when loggers in the upper Midwest transformed magnificent forests into desolate, swampy fields of stumps, people began to worry about the risk such rapid resource depletion posed to the nation. By the mid-1890s, Americans were destroying woodlands at 5-times the rate of Europeans, prompting scientists to warn that the country was headed toward environmental and economic catastrophe. “People began using the phrase ‘timber famine,'” says historian Patricia Nelson Limerick. (Clayton, 2019; Nordhaus, 2018)
Today Americans have merely outsourced most of this environmental destruction to other parts of the world.
Why Forests Matter
The world’s forests – and rainforests in particular–are crucial to life on this planet for a number of reasons:
1) They are banks of biodiversity
The world’s forests are home to a variety of unique forms of plant and animal life. Tropical forests, which cover just 7% of the Earth’s surface, may house as much as 80% of the planet’s species. (Lindon, 1989; Thompson & Hickey, 2008) On the island of Madagascar, over 90% of the native species are found nowhere else on Earth. Yet only 7% of the original forest remains. (Davis, 1998)
2) They regulate the climate
The presence of rainforests alter climate patterns throughout the world, much in the same way the polar ice caps do, just to a smaller degree. But like large deserts, they are still quite capable of affecting the climate of nearby regions. Trees release tiny airborne molecules that promote cloud formation, and forest plumage can change how much heat a landscape absorbs. Even the presence of a green area within a city can drop the temperature of the areas around it by a few degrees.
Rainforests also regulate their own climate through a process referred to as evapotranspiration. Vegetation within the forest releases water vapor into the air, which forms into clouds and falls back down as recycled rainfall. In places like the Amazon, around a third of the rainfall is due to this process. (Emont, 2008) When vegetation is cleared away, you take away this added moisture, changing the climate and making it harder for growth to occur. It also makes these forested areas more susceptible to fire.
For instance, the country of Malaysia has lost 30% of its forest in recent decades. Coinciding with this loss was a 20% decline in rainfall, and a 3 degree Fahrenheit average increase in temperatures in forested areas. As rainforests are lost and converted into farmland or revert back to savanna, it changes climate patterns for the entire region.
3) Forests are the Earth’s lungs
Unlike you and I, vegetation breathes carbon dioxide and exhales oxygen, giving the Earth its crucial oxygen that you and I breathe and need to survive. The Amazon rainforest alone, for example, produces 20% of the Earth’s oxygen. This is like the difference between breathing normally and breathing at the top of Mount Everest. If we continue to cut the world’s forests down, we may end up without a breathable atmosphere.
4) Deforestation contributes to climate change
The CO2 we’re pumping into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels is only half the climate problem. The other half of the equation that doesn’t get nearly as much attention is that at the same time we’re doing this, we’re also stripping the Earth of its carbon absorbing forests. Each tree can store an average of around 48 pounds of CO2 in one year. (de Groot, 2019) Every tree that is cut down takes away a Co2 sucking, oxygen-producing force of nature, which means that much less oxygen and that much more carbon dioxide in the years to come.
Deforestation also contributes to climate change in an immediate sense. Many forests aren’t cut, they are burned, releasing all that stored carbon into the atmosphere at once. Mining companies that clear away forests leave the vegetation in compost piles that rot and decay, releasing more carbon into the atmosphere. Taking away the trees also releases carbon stored in the ground and in low-lying vegetation, further adding to the problem.
The Amazon rainforest alone absorbs about 5% of all global carbon dioxide emissions. (Magalhaes & Pearson, 2019) But every tree that is cut takes just a little bit more out of this carbon absorption column and puts it into the carbon release column.