Did you know that the average tree produces enough oxygen for ten people for a year, storing carbon dioxide in the process? Unfortunately, deforestation is destroying the very thing that’s keeping us alive on this planet.
Years ago, “Stop Deforestation” was all the rage, that is, when the environmentalist movement was in full swing. Things have changed very little over the years and, in spite of the cries having been somewhat muted over the years, deforestation continues to devastate the world’s forests. Pollution, erosion, carbon dioxide sequestration, and climate change are all connected, and the common denominator is us…
Every tree that gets cut down, every piece of furniture tossed into a landfill, and every book not sent to a book swap, they all contribute to this growing problem of deforestation. In the 1950s, for example, about 15% of Earth’s arable land was covered by rainforest. Today, that number has been reduced to just 6%, and could be reduced to just 1.5% by 2020. While millions of acres of rainforest and other forest is burned for cattle ranching and other agrarian activities, climate change is affected adversely by the carbon dioxide released.
Right now, more than one trillion tons of carbon dioxide is sequestered in the world’s forests, twice the amount that’s currently in the atmosphere. This means that deforestation is also a principal factor in climate change, in addition to the burning of fossil fuels, basically releasing even more sequestered carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. This is but one of the reasons that wood product recycling is so important, from recycled paper products to repurposed furniture. Is anyone still listening to the silent cry of the trees?
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