Solemn Transition : Worldwide Costs Mount as Trees Fall

Humans owe a debt of thanks to forests. Forests clear the air, moderate the climate, protect soil from erosion and keep water clean. Forests provide lumber, fuel and food, as well as raw material for paper, plastics, medicines and a thousand other products. Forests offer refuge to the landless, the rebellious and the weary.

How have humans repaid forests? By chopping, sawing, slashing, burning, blasting and bulldozing them. By poisoning them with herbicides, mine tailings and acid rain; scarring them with logging roads, skid trails and sawmills; drowning them behind dams; clearing them for farms and pastures, and paving them over for highways and cities.

In the last 5,000 years, humans have reduced forests from roughly 50% of the Earth’s land surface to 20%. This ages-old devastation is accelerating. According to United Nations estimates, Africa has lost 23% of its forests since 1950, Central America 38% and the Himalayan watershed 40%. Tropical rain forests are going fast. Acid rain has damaged half of West Germany’s trees, killing many. U.S. forests continue to shrink in area and now contain only a fifth as much timber as they did when the Pilgrims landed.

Deforestation has exacted an enormous toll through the ages in environmental damage, economic deterioration and human misery. Soil erosion, flooding and silting of rivers, reservoirs, canals and harbors are among the environmental effects. Deforestation has created barren hillsides, creeping sand dunes, desert-like heaths, water-logged moors, malarial swamps.

Decline and Fall of Empires

Deforestation has had a major impact on society. Historians contend deforestation of Greece and Italy contributed significantly to the decline and fall of the ancient Greek and Roman empires. Ascendancy gradually passed from the deforested Mediterranean region to heavily forested Northern Europe. Much later, a deforested England lost control of its timber-rich American colonies.

Wars have been fought for possession of forests, and many a forest has deliberately been destroyed to punish an enemy. Conquerors and colonizers have taken forested foreign lands after deforesting and ruining their own. Cities have been abandoned and capitals relocated because of deforestation.

Deforestation has even influenced religion. Some scholars trace the Jewish and Moslem prohibitions against eating pork to deforestation of the Near East, which deprived pigs of their natural forest habitat and made them too expensive to feed and keep cool.

The deforestation currently taking place in the tropical Third World strikes experts as all the more tragic because it repeats mistakes the temperate First World already has made. Says Stanley E. Krugman, director of timber management research for the U.S. Forest Service, “A lot of countries aren’t learning from our mistakes, just as we failed to learn from the Europeans.”

Failure to learn from past mistakes and to correct the current situation has economic, political and social ramifications that extend beyond the areas undergoing deforestation. Far from being a narrow issue of concern only to residents of deforested areas, nature lovers and lumber merchants, deforestation in an increasingly interdependent world economy directly affects U.S. interests in terms of trade, investment and political stability.

To be fair, people aren’t responsible for all deforestation. Windstorms, volcanic eruptions, lightning fires, drought and other natural disasters also take their toll. So do deer, porcupines, beavers, gophers, rats and other wild animals that feed on trees and sometimes kill them. Dwarf mistletoe and other parasitic plants suck and smother trees to death. And beetles, budworms, gypsy moths and other insects, along with rusts, rots, blights and other diseases, consume more trees than humans harvest.

Making Matters Worse

Still, humans have a history of making matters worse by altering the balance of nature and inadvertently causing deforestation. In the Pacific, the introduction of non-native deer, goats and pigs onto islands where they had no natural enemies swelled their populations and sent them rampaging through the forests like locusts. In Arizona, a government policy of making the Kaibab Plateau into a game preserve for deer by eliminating the coyotes, wolves and bobcats that had preyed on them increased their numbers beyond anything the region could support. As a result, the forest thinned and the deer starved.

Even more havoc followed the importation of the gypsy moth from France in 1869. Introduced into Massachusetts as part of a misguided silkworm-breeding experiment, the pest soon escaped from the laboratory to nearby woods. Since then it has spread across the country, leaving caterpillar-defoliated woods in its wake.

As the gypsy moth epidemic suggests, most environmental problems have no respect for political boundaries. The United States, for instance, generates air pollution from power plants, smelters and motor vehicles that falls in Canada as acid rain, sickening forests and killing trees. Germany imports acid rain from Great Britain and France--and exports its own to Poland and Czechoslovakia.

The effects of deforestation are also international. Soil washed from the deforested foothills of the Himalayan Mountains in Nepal silts up rivers and farm fields upon which hundreds of millions of people in the lowlands of India and Bangladesh depend for survival. Over the years, the silt has created new islands in the Bay of Bengal and caused devastating floods that have reduced harvests and taken thousands of lives.

Many Dams in Trouble

Many Third World dams built with aid from industrialized countries are losing effectiveness as silt from deforested watersheds clogs the reservoirs behind them, reducing the dams’ capacity to generate electricity, control floods and provide irrigation water. Siltation in the watershed of the Panama Canal has raised concerns over the canal’s continued capacity to handle shipping.

Industrial countries have spent billions of dollars to feed victims of deforestation and revegetate denuded landscapes in the Third World. In Haiti, once lush but now the most deforested nation in the Western Hemisphere, one-tenth of the population depends on public and private aid from the United States. In the West African Sahel, more than $160 million has been spent since 1972 on plantations to supply firewood and on other forestry projects, most of which have failed. And in Ethiopia, according to World Bank senior energy specialist Ken Newcombe, “if we gave the country $500 million to reforest, it wouldn’t do the trick.”

Economic and social disruptions caused by deforestation often lead to unrest and bloodshed. According to a 1982 report prepared for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the “fundamental causes” of the civil war in El Salvador “are as much environmental as political, stemming from problems of resource distribution in an overcrowded land.” The report concluded that “almost complete deforestation, massive soil erosion and loss of fertility,” combined with high rural unemployment and unequal land distribution, had prompted many peasants to abandon farming to join the guerrillas.

Victims Become Refugees

Millions of victims of deforestation have become environmental refugees. Half-starved Africans flee barren lands for neighboring countries that can hardly support their own citizens. Desperate Haitians escape their denuded homeland to other Caribbean islands, the United States and Canada.

“One of the reasons we have Haitian refugees in Florida is that there is nothing but drought and ruin in deforested Haiti,” says Catherine Caufield, author of “In the Rainforest.”

The destruction of tropical forests is reducing the biological storehouse upon which the entire world depends for an astonishing array of products. Although covering just 7% of the world’s land surface, the green forest belt around the Earth’s equatorial waist contains about half of all known species of plants and animals, with many millions waiting to be discovered. Diminishing this immense reservoir of genetic diversity reduces opportunities to improve the characteristics of such tropical crops as bananas, cocoa and coffee by increasing their yields and resistance to drought, disease and insects. It also reduces opportunities to discover and develop new foods, drugs and other products.

Flow of Products Jeopardized

Deforestation in both tropical and temperate regions jeopardizes the continued flow of forest products upon which First World economies depend even in this age of metals, plastics and fossil fuels. Most industrial countries are net importers of forest products. Despite its still vast forests, the United States imported $5.6 billion more in wood products in 1986 than it exported.

Europe demonstrates the link between deforestation and economic deterioration as well as any region. Consider Sicily. Once a well-wooded, fertile island and a flower of ancient Greek culture and prosperity, Sicily was so deforested by a succession of conquerors, including the Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans and Spanish, that it became almost desert-like by the 13th Century and has never found its way back from the poorhouse.

Or take Ireland. Long since stripped of its forests by the English, Ireland is today the least-forested nation in Europe and also one of the poorest, its finances drained by the necessity of importing forest products and its job opportunities reduced by the lack of forest resources.

Overall, Europe has a greater area in forest now than at the turn of the century. But this minor comeback is threatened by acid rain.

The relative stabilization of forest cover in Europe and most other temperate regions is the exception. Worldwide, forests have been halved since 1850. This is only a rough estimate, of course, as precise measurement is impossible and experts disagree on the extent of tree cover necessary to distinguish a forest from open woodlands with scattered trees.

‘Global 2000 Report’

The U.S. government’s “Global 2000 Report,” published in 1980, estimated that forest cover declined from more than 25% of the world’s ice-free land surface in 1956 to 20% in 1978. It projected a further decline to about 17% by the year 2000 and 14% around the year 2020, and lamented that the downward trend marks a “transition from a period of global forest wealth to a period of forest poverty.”

Even those gloomy statistics underestimate the decline. Much remaining forest is in the far north of Canada, Scandinavia and the Soviet Union, where trees are small, slow-growing and too distant from markets to be economically accessible. While the area of these sparse northern forests has remained stable, the sharpest decline has taken place in dense tropical forests with larger trees.

The Soviet Union leads the world in forest resources, with more than a third of its land surface in forest. But despite centralized ownership and planning, its forest management has been neither consistent nor always enlightened. While lightly utilizing forests in the far north and Siberia, the Soviets have been overcutting accessible areas near rivers, roads and rail lines, as well as in large portions of European Russia.

What’s more, according to one Russian forestry official, A. S. Isayev, the Soviet Union is reforesting only one-third of the area on which it harvests timber, and “the gap between timber consumption and reforestation is still growing.” As a consequence, he says, “Our timber resources will not last more than 50 years unless we step up our reforestation efforts.”

Canada Digs ‘Long-Term Hole’

Canada is also cutting merchantable timber faster in accessible areas than it is being replaced and expects shortages of high-quality accessible timber within 20 to 30 years. “Canada is digging itself into a long-term hole to take advantage of a short-term market opportunity” in exporting to the United States, says R. Neil Sampson, executive vice president of the conservationist American Forestry Assn.

The situation in the United States is similarly solemn. Forests covered 50% of the United States when European colonists began arriving in the early 1600s, but they cover less than 33% today. Forests made a slight comeback after World War II as cropland and pastureland were idled and reverted to forest. But since 1962, forests, most notably in the South, have been shrinking again with conversion to fields and pastures, reservoirs, power lines, pipelines, highways, airports and urban sprawl. And the U.S. Forest Service expects the decline to continue.

What’s more, the quality of what remains is inferior to the virgin stands of old, thanks to the historic practice of cutting the best and the largest trees and the preferred species. Across much of the country, heavy logging and repeated burning have permitted commercially less desirable hardwood species to encroach on more valuable softwood stands, leaving mostly small-sized, low-quality trees for which there is little or no commercial demand.

Repeating mistakes made by Europeans and North Americans in the past, Asians, Africans and Latin Americans are destroying their forests at an accelerated rate. Peasants clear land to grow food, ranchers move in to graze cattle, loggers mow down trees for export, and firewood gatherers grab what’s left. According to the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, some 42,000 square miles of tropical forest, an area nearly the size of Louisiana, are disappearing each year.

“Instead of having a band of greenery around the equator, the Earth may eventually feature a bald ring,” warns Norman Myers, author of “The Primary Source: Tropical Forests and Our Future.” “These ecosystems, the most ancient on Earth, have been in existence for at least 50 million years, and they are being eliminated within a period of half a century or so, or one-millionth part of their history.”

What most alarms environmentalists like Myers is that ecological recovery in the tropics will prove much more difficult than it has been in Western Europe and the Eastern United States where fairly flat land, gentle rainfall, good soils and natural regeneration have minimized damage from deforestation.

Where the land is hilly, the climate arid or rainfall torrential, soils shallow, and economic pressures prevent good husbandry, as they do in most of the Third World, removal of the original vegetation can set self-reinforcing processes in motion that lead to irreversible damage.

“Tropical forests are harder to manage than temperate forests,” says the U.S. Forest Service’s Krugman. “Soils are more fragile, less nutrient-rich, and when the nutrient flow is interrupted, they don’t recover easily. We don’t know how to manage the tropics, and the social, economic and population pressures prevent what we do know from being practiced.”

The rapid depletion of tropical forests can be traced in large measure to affluent life styles in temperate countries. The industrialized world’s hunger for tropical hardwood furniture, wall paneling and other products has tempted many Third World governments eager for foreign exchange to overexploit their forests to the brink of exhaustion.

Japan Husbands Its Forests

Japan, which imports more wood than any other country, abets the overexploitation of Southeast Asian forests even as it husbands its own forests, keeping two-thirds of its mountainous land surface forested to protect watersheds and conserve its own timber against the day when overseas stocks run out.

As they have been for centuries, many tropical forests are being cleared to make way for plantations of bananas, pineapples, peanuts, coffee, cotton and other crops destined mainly for export to affluent industrialized countries. Other forests are converted to pasture to produce beef for overseas markets. Still others die to supply firewood to cure tobacco and tea, again mostly for export.

International aid agencies and multinational development banks are part of the problem as well as the solution. While sponsoring tree planting with one hand, they have opened up the Third World to further deforestation by funding large-scale agricultural, road-building and hydroelectric projects.

World Bank Finances Road

For instance, World Bank loans since 1982 to help Brazil build a 1,100-mile road into the Amazon frontier have opened a forested area the size of West Germany to rice growing and other development. The road has encouraged half a million land-hungry laborers displaced by farm mechanization elsewhere in Brazil to stream into the forest, invade areas set aside for indigenous Indian tribes and try to scratch a living from fragile soils unsuitable for either farming or grazing.

If Brazil and other Third World nations keep acting as though their natural resources are inexhaustible, they are only following the lead of the United States. When Europeans first explored what is now the United States, the dense forest that blanketed the eastern third of the country was so redolent that they could smell it at sea long before the coast came within sight.

Coming from a continent that already had been largely deforested, early settlers were astonished at the huge trees and primeval wilderness. So thick was the cover that it was said, probably without exaggeration, that a squirrel could travel in treetops all the way from the Atlantic Coast to the Mississippi River without ever touching the ground. And the virgin forest extended even beyond that, to the central Great Plains.

To the first white settlers, the forest was an obstacle to be cleared before agriculture could begin. And even after hacking out farms, the colonists saw the woods as a dangerous sanctuary for wild beasts and a base from which Indians could launch raids. So they kept enlarging the clearings and pushing back the dark, sinister forest. To them, the only good tree, like the only good Indian, was a dead one.

Along with faith in the inexhaustibility of forest resources, this heritage of hostility became ingrained in the frontier spirit, hastening the indiscriminate, wanton destruction of forests long after they had ceased to be barriers to settlement of the country.

Forests Seen as Obstacles

So, too, today do tropical countries view their forests as obstacles to the agriculture needed to feed growing populations and as an underused asset needed to generate foreign exchange. Too busy surviving today to worry about tomorrow, they mine the forests rather than treat them as a renewable resource.

Just as today’s environmentalists raise alarms at tropical deforestation, so a few lonely voices spoke out against the rape of U.S. virgin forests. Benjamin Franklin in 1749 urgently advocated an end to the reckless slaughter of the woods. Later, Henry David Thoreau lamented that if loggers were tall enough they would surely attempt to lay waste the sky. Unfortunately, Americans were too busy felling trees to pay heed.

Though the idea of conservation struck most Americans as ludicrous, the decline in the quality of U.S. forests began in Colonial times with the culling of New England forests for white pine masts and white oak timbers for the English navy. Stripping forests of the most valuable timbers left crooked, stunted trees and inferior species to regenerate. The legacy today is that choice walnut is so scarce that a single log sold recently for $25,000.

Today’s lumber merchants could make fortunes selling the magnificent trees yesterday’s loggers wasted. Felling an entire stand of trees and then taking only the choice butt logs was common. So was peeling the bark from ancient oaks and hemlocks and then leaving them to rot, while the bark was leached to obtain tannic acid to tan hides. And when lumberjacks weren’t cutting off giant sequoias as much as 20 feet above the ground, letting the great tops crash to the forest floor and often splinter into uselessness, they were blasting them down with dynamite, wasting half the timber and setting fire to what was left.

Fire Used Indiscriminately

Both settlers and loggers used fire indiscriminately. Farmers eager to clear land as quickly and cheaply as possible often cut trees and then burned them where they lay. Loggers used fire to clear out underbrush before logging and to destroy debris afterward.

During drought and hot weather, fires often got out of control and raced across the land. The most deadly fire, in Wisconsin in 1871, burned 2,000 square miles and took 1,152 lives. In 1910, several small fires whipped by high winds formed a river of flame that burned a sixth of north Idaho’s forests, killing 87 people and sending up a pall of smoke that darkened the sky as far away as St. Louis.

Fires often destroyed more timber than the amount cut. Worse, by wiping out young trees left on the cutover site, they delayed and sometimes prevented future timber crops. Still worse, fires damaged sandy and other fragile soils, creating desolate barrens where only stunted trees could grow. In the repeatedly blackened New Jersey Pine Barrens, where trees once towered over people, damaged soils now support only four-foot pygmy pines.

The shortsighted abuse Americans heaped on their land and its natural resources continues today both here and abroad. Farmers who cleared forests in the lower Mississippi River Valley to grow soybeans and other crops in recent decades sold barely a third of the timber, bulldozing most of the rest into windrows and burning it.

Harvested Timber Wasted

Waste is even more appalling in the Third World. In Costa Rica, which has the highest annual percentage loss of forest in Central America, more than half of the timber harvested is burned or allowed to rot in place, according to biologist Rodrigo Gamez. And in Borneo, where the Indonesian government permits logging of huge tracts, logging debris left after harvesting fueled a 1983 fire that raced through the drought-parched rain forest for four months, burning an area larger than Massachusetts and Connecticut combined and destroying an estimated $6 billion in future harvestable timber.

Cut-and-run logging makes for boom-and-bust economies. After removing the biggest and best trees in the East, the U.S. lumber industry shifted production first to the Great Lakes states, then to the South, and finally to the West. Now, with the depletion of the last reservoir of old-growth timber in the West, the center is shifting again, this time to Canada and back to the South.

The cutting of superior, commercially valuable forests without thought to their regeneration leaves low-value forests, unemployed workers and ghost towns. Michigan is trying to diversify its economy to take up the slack left by the dispersion of its mainstay industry, motor vehicle manufacturing. But one of its options, revitalizing the once-booming lumber industry, is dimmed by the fact that the jack pine and other shrubby trees in its cut-over forests are suitable only for pulping. Says assistant state forester Gerald A. Rose, “The biggest problem in forest management in Michigan is finding markets for low-quality trees.”

Clearing Unsuitable Land

Another mistake still being repeated is trying to grow food crops on land suitable only for growing trees. Just as American pioneers laboriously cleared many forests only to discover that their soils were too stony, sandy or soggy to sustain continued cultivation, so today many Third World farmers trying to wrest a living from the nutrient-poor, acidic soils typical of the tropics commonly give up and move on after several years.

One of the worst mistakes of all is removing the protective covering of trees in dry areas that lack the regenerative power of forests in better watered regions. The world is littered with the wreckage of civilizations that tried to farm and graze dry forest land, only to see the land dry out even more and the soil blow and wash away.

In India, where the northwest Rajasthan Desert now occupies more than a fifth of the nation’s land area, the Harappan civilization had a thriving culture about 2000-1700 BC. But deforestation and overgrazing caused strong winds to blow away the soil. The consequent suspended dust caused the moist atmosphere to cool and sink, instead of warming and rising and forming precipitation. Rainfall declined and the civilization vanished.

In the Near East and around the Mediterranean, vast expanses of arid landscape are less fertile and support fewer people today than they did thousands of years ago. North Africa, which had a forest belt between the coast and the interior desert in Roman times and exported timber, grain and olive oil, degenerated into today’s arid adjunct to the Sahara once the ax took the trees and goats devoured the sprouts of their would-be replacements.

Spaniards’ Destructive Habits

The Europeans who conquered the New World took their environmentally destructive habits with them. Coming from a dry land ruined by deforestation and overgrazing, the Spaniards duplicated the devastation in Mexico and Peru. According to William H. Prescott’s classic “History of the Conquest of Mexico,” replicating the treeless plains of their own Castile esthetically pleased the homesick conquistadors, while owners of giant haciendas cut down trees to prevent “lazy Indians on the plantation from wasting their time by loitering in their shade.”

In California, timber cutting and fires set by modern-day sheepmen to “green up” the range have converted vast stretches of forests in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and elsewhere to juniper, chaparral and sagebrush. Is even worse still to come?

“If you want to see what California will look like in a thousand years, all you have to do is look at Greece and the southern, more arid portions of Spain and Italy,” says John B. Dewitt, a forester who heads the Save-the-Redwoods League in San Francisco. “When you start messing around with arid conditions and shallow soils, you can go from forest to brush to grass to bare rock.”

Unfortunately, one needn’t wait to see such ecological collapse. Erosion and desiccation are well under way in many parts of the Third World, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where desertification is setting the stage for what former World Bank President Robert S. McNamara has called “a human tragedy of vast proportions.”

Often Hard to Perceive

Because deforestation proceeds tree by tree, communities and countries often do not perceive a deforestation crisis until it is too late to take effective remedial action. Other societies see the dangers but ignore the risk.

Wealthy, sophisticated, land-rich nations such as the United States would seem to have less excuse to commit ecocide than do poor, mountainous countries such as China. China, which has suffered longer and more deeply from deforestation and soil erosion than any other major country, has so densely populated its fertile river valleys for so long that peasants have had little choice but to put their immediate survival ahead of the public good or even their own progeny’s well-being.

The Communist government has tried to change all that. Experts say China has planted more trees since the 1950s than any other country. But it also has continued to convert forests to wheat fields, in accordance with Mao Tse-tung’s “grain first” policy. During his ill-conceived Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, forests were cut to provide charcoal for primitive “backyard” iron furnaces. And during the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, many private orchards and small woodlots were destroyed as “capitalist tails.”

Since privatization of the economy began in the late 1970s, the construction boom in peasant housing has prompted poachers to sneak out at night and saw down trees and even telephone poles. Government statistics show that forest cover actually slipped from 12.7% of China’s land surface in 1975 to 12% in 1981. That’s an improvement on the 9% forest cover the Communists inherited in 1949, but it’s a long way from the official goal of 20% by the year 2000, which American experts consider unattainable, and 33% eventually.

Lumber Shortages in China

Unfortunately, China doesn’t have centuries--not if it wants to continue to modernize. With only a tenth of the world average in forest resources per capita, the country already is experiencing shortages of railway crossties, transmission poles, mine pit props and construction lumber that are hampering industrialization.

At least China has extensive deposits of coal to keep its iron and steel industry going. But underdeveloped countries that have little or no coal to provide the heat and carbon necessary to smelt ores and refine metals, and that also are losing the forests that could provide a substitute in charcoal derived from wood, stand a dim chance of joining the industrial revolution anytime soon.

Like China, most developing countries are net importers of forest products, particularly paper, the production of which requires both wood and manufacturing plants. Paper products use a quarter of the world’s commercial wood harvest, and this proportion is expected to increase in the decades ahead.

While shortages of paper slow the spread of technical information upon which modernization depends, shortages of firewood are deepening hunger and even threatening survival. Half of the world’s people still use wood to cook their meals. When firewood grows scarce, they turn to burning twigs and leaves, straw and other crop residues, and dried animal dung. This diversion of organic matter and nutrients that should go to fertilize fields reduces crop yields, accelerating pressure to clear still more forests.

Time-Consuming Fuel Searches

As forests recede from villages in the Third World, women and children spend an inordinate amount of time--often two days--gathering a week’s supply of firewood for their family. Scavenging for wood has created desert-like conditions in semi-arid regions of Africa, India and Latin America. And the rising cost of wood and its derivative charcoal forces millions of city dwellers to spend as much to cook their food as to buy it.

Generally, the poorer the country, the greater its reliance on wood as an energy source. Yet industrial countries have dramatically increased their firewood use since the early 1970s when petroleum supplies dwindled and prices soared. Half the timber cut in the Soviet Union is burned as firewood and an estimated 25% in the United States.

One in four American households now burns wood for at least part of its heating needs. And electric utilities in well-wooded New England and the Pacific Northwest are following lumber, pulp and paper mills in generating electricity from wood.

The forests of the future are expected to become increasingly important to help fill the gap left by the depletion of the coal, oil and natural gas formed from the giant ferns, mosses and other plants in the forests of the past. Wood’s versatility as an energy source was demonstrated in World War II when many gasoline-short countries used gas derived from wood to run motor vehicles, including London buses, Danish farm tractors and German tanks. Currently, wood gas is powering electrical generators in several African countries, as well as coastal ships in the Philippines.

More Uses Found for Wood

Even the most technologically advanced countries stand to lose if deforestation continues to spread. For far from becoming obsolescent as technology advances, wood is finding more uses than ever. Nowadays one can dress entirely in textiles that originate in the forest. Even plastics have increased demand for wood, as wood cellulose is a necessary ingredient in many plastics, not to mention cellophane, rayon, many pharmaceuticals and artificial vanilla flavoring.

The average American uses twice as much wood as all metals combined. Wood constitutes more than 25% of all U.S. industrial raw materials, and the ratio has been rising since the mid-1970s as higher fossil-fuel prices have made energy-intensive substitutes such as steel, aluminum, cement and glass less competitive.

With 5% of the world’s population, the United States now consumes more than 25% of all lumber, plywood and other solid-wood products in the entire world, as well as 33% of the paper and paperboard. Newspapers, magazines and books account for much of the paper use, but packaging even more.

With U.S. demand for wood rising faster than supplies, U.S. Forest Service economist Dwight Hair foresees “a future of intensifying competition for available wood and rising real prices for stumpage and most wood products.” As prices rise, so will the cost of affordable housing.

Pressure on forests is also expected to intensify as wood is increasingly substituted for steel, aluminum, concrete, brick, glass, plastics and other materials.

Water Supplies at Stake

The forests of the future will also be needed to supply unpolluted water. Nearly two-thirds of all running water in the United States falls first on forests, which tend to occupy higher elevations and receive more precipitation. As underground water supplies dry up or become polluted, forested watersheds are expected to become an increasingly vital source of pure water for drinking and irrigation.

“Water is the No. 1 resource issue in California,” says Zane G. Smith Jr., Pacific Southwest regional forester for the U.S. Forest Service. “Once you contaminate water, it doesn’t clean itself readily.” With contamination of water supplies by pesticides and other pollutants in the Central Valley “likely to surface in other places,” he says, “we need to keep forests as pure as possible.”

However enlightened California’s forestry practices may prove, the propensity around the world is still to value forests more for the timber they yield than for their often far more important benefits in protecting the soil, moderating the climate and providing pure water, habitat for wildlife and opportunities for relaxation and recreation. Worse, instead of being valued, forests in many countries continue to be resented as competition for space needed for crops and flocks.

Clearly, the world has not yet come to grips with deforestation. Many governments act as though there were still virgin forests on the frontier to move on to, when in fact the world is fast running out of virgin forests. Many nations continue to mine forests for as long as the riches last, rather than maintain them as renewable resources. Most seem content to take the profit--and let future generations take care of themselves.

Day of Reckoning Approaches

Putting short-run economic expediency over investment in long-term, sustained-yield production is understandable, given the 20- to 100-year gap between tree planting and payoff. But with forests in 76 tropical countries being cleared 10 times faster than they are being replanted, according to a U.N. estimate, and forest renewal lagging behind exploitation even in advanced societies such as the United States, the day of reckoning cannot be long delayed.

In most of the Third World, the economic and social problems that underlie much deforestation remain unaddressed. As Erik Eckholm points out in “Down to Earth: Environment and Human Needs,” “Usually, uncontrolled deforestation is a symptom of a society’s inability to get a grip on other fundamental development problems: agricultural stagnation, grossly unequal land tenure, rising unemployment, rapid population growth and the incapacity to regulate private enterprise to protect the public interest.”

Developing nations have only a third as many forest resources per capita as industrialized nations, and this disparity is widening as both population growth and deforestation rates in the Third World outpace the industrialized world’s. Unless this trend is reversed, deforestation could contribute to widening the economic gap between the rich industrialized world and poor developing nations.

Another unsettling possibility is climatic change. As forests are cleared and wood is burned or left to rot, the carbon dioxide released into the Earth’s atmosphere adds to the heat-trapping greenhouse effect. Many scientists expect a continued build-up of carbon dioxide and other trace gases to warm the world, melting glaciers and some of the polar ice caps and causing oceans to rise and coastal cities and plains to be flooded. Global warming, in turn, would change the pattern of rainfall, benefiting some regions and harming others.

Sooner or later, then, the debt that humans owe for 5,000 years of deforestation must be repaid. Trying to overpower nature succeeds, in the end, only in impoverishing the planet.