Reuters article about deforestation
While I try to do my part to educate others, give some money to those associations I trust, and shop responsibly when I can, I am convinced now that most of the next generation will never in their lives visit a forest. They are disappearing so quietly and so quickly that most people aren't missing them yet. One generation can be glad to have the cash profits from selling those big old trees that just took up space, and enjoy a new life as a farmer, with sunshine and land of their own. But when 3 billion people think like this, and once the forest is sold and razed, how can it ever return? Sure weeds may someday take over an abandoned farm, but the original tree and animal species that inhabited that unique ecosystem are gone forever. Forever. And our grandchildren won't miss them because they never experienced walking beneath living things two stories high. Cool, damp breezes will be rare, and everyone will blame others for the dust storms, droughts, floods and hurricanes of the future. Already most people in northern and central France must drive almost an hour to find a forest, and then it is a managed forest, with trees planted in rows, or acres that are thinnned, harvested and rotated every 50 years. There are few animals and no natural sense of beauty or wilderness since the paths are flat, straight and paved, and turn at exact angles.
Wild animals will also become a rare phenomenon in the next hundred years, so that most of what remain in zoos will be the last examples of other living creatures that used to inhabit the earth with humans. The deer, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, and the occasional bear or mountain lion that still roam North America are already gone from the European continent. People drive an hour to come stare at the few captive deer that are kept in a part of the forest here where we live, and the deer stare blankly at the people on the other side of the fence, with ears flopped down and no fear or energy in their stare. In another 300 years most children will learn of the animals of the past, when giraffes and bears are in books alongside dinosaurs, and only dogs, cats, birds, fish and insects will remain to accompany humanity.
The stupid thing is that we can stop it now, but we won't, because we need a new end table from Target, and the fact that it's 20% cheaper than an antique or something made from sustainable wood means that we'll buy it, even if it's made in China and even if we're aware of what we're doing (I just bought said end-table from Target two weeks ago...). So we're all guilty, and yet, we each have to measure our own efforts, and not the efforts of others.
