Page 330 - Environment: The Science Behind the Stories

production. Lesser proportions were designated for conservation (pp. 241–242). Moreover, forest loss adds carbon dioxide to
of biodiversity, protection of soil and water quality, recreation, the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change.
tourism, education, and conservation of culturally important sites. In 2010, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization
Most commercial timber extraction today takes place in Canada, (FAO) released its latest Global Forest Resources Assessment.
Russia, and other nations with large expanses of boreal forest, In this report, researchers combined remote sensing data from
and in tropical nations with large areas of rainforest, such as Bra- satellites, analysis from forest experts, questionnaire responses,
zil and Indonesia. In the United States, most logging takes place and statistical modeling to form a comprehensive picture of the
in pine plantations of the South and conifer forests of the West. world’s forests. The assessment concluded that we are eliminat-
ing 13 million hectares (32 million acres) of forest each year.
Subtracting annual regrowth from this amount makes for an
Forest Loss annual net loss of 5.2 million hectares (12.8 million acres)—
an area about half the size of Kentucky or twice the size of
Our demand for wood and paper products and our need for open Massachusetts. This rate (for the decade 2000–2010) is lower
land for agriculture have led us to clear forested land. When than the deforestation rate for the 1990s, when 8.3 million ha
trees are removed more quickly than they can regrow, the result (20.5 million acres) were lost worldwide each year.
is deforestation, the clearing and loss of forests. Deforestation
has altered landscapes across much of our planet. In the time it We deforested much of North America
takes you to read this sentence, 2 hectares (5 acres) of tropical
forest will have been cleared. As we alter, fragment, and elimi- Deforestation for timber and farmland propelled the expan-
nate forests, we lose biodiversity, worsen climate change, and sion of the United States and Canada westward across the
disrupt the ecosystem services that support our societies. North American continent. The vast deciduous forests of the
East were cleared by the mid-19th century, making way for
Agriculture and demand for wood put countless small farms. Timber from these forests built the cit-
pressure on forests ies of the Atlantic seaboard. Cities such as Chicago, Detroit,
and Milwaukee were constructed with timber felled in the vast
From the slash-and-burn farmer cutting tropical rainforest to pine and hardwood forests of Wisconsin and Michigan.
the American suburbanite shopping at a grocery store, we all As a farming economy shifted to an industrial one, wood
depend on food and fiber grown on cropland and rangeland— was used to stoke the furnaces of industry. Logging operations
much of which occupies land where forests once grew. All of moved south to the Ozarks of Missouri and Arkansas, and
us also depend in some way on wood, from the subsistence then to the pine woodlands and bottomland hardwood forests
herder in Nepal cutting trees for firewood to the American of the South, which were logged and converted to pine plan-
student consuming reams of paper in the course of getting a tations. Once mature trees were removed from these areas,
degree. To make way for agriculture and to extract wood prod- timber companies moved west, cutting the continent’s biggest
ucts, people have been clearing forests for millennia. trees in the Rocky Mountains, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascade
Forest clearing has fed our civilization’s growth, but Mountains, and the Pacific Coast ranges.
unsustainable forest loss has negative consequences, espe- By the 20th century, very little primary forest—natural
cially as human population grows. Deforestation leads forest uncut by people—remained in the lower 48 U.S.
to biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and desertification states, and today even less is left (FIGURE 12.5). Nearly all of CHAPTER 12 • FOREST S, FOREST MAN A GEMENT, AND PR O TECTED AREAS

(a) 1620: Areas of primary (uncut) forest (b) Today: Areas of primary (uncut) forest
FIGURE 12.5 Areas of primary (uncut) forest have been dramatically reduced over the last few hun-
dred years. When Europeans first colonized North America (a), the entire eastern half of the continent and
substantial portions of the western half were covered in primary forest (shown in green). Today, nearly all this
primary forest is gone (b), having been cut for timber and to make way for agriculture. (Much of the landscape
has become reforested with secondary forest.) Sources: (a) adapted from Greeley, W.B., 1925. The relation of geography to
timber supply, Economic Geography 1:1–11; and (b) map by George Draffan, www.endgame.org. 329

M12_WITH7428_05_SE_C12.indd 329 12/12/14 4:51 PM