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Repost: originally posted 17/03/08.
It is crazy to think how much we use wood without even thinking about it. Every leaflet, every letter, most doors, tables and houses make some use of wood. The rate we are killing off the worlds natural rainforests is quite alarming too!
Some of the countries presently being deprived of forest land are Brazil (with the largest and most diverse forest land), Nigeria (having the highest rate of deforestation, losing 50% of forest land in just the last 5 years alone) and Ethiopia (which has lost a staggering 98% of it’s forest land in the last 50 years!).
I couldn’t for one minute blame these countries, as they are probably not the main consumers of the wood they extract. It’s the developed countries that are to blame. It’s all well and good now that the forests are nearly all gone so we need to be more green and think about recycling / energy conservation, but it is too late for that.
Paper can only be recycled once as it loses it’s consistency and always needs some natural wood to keep it strong enough to use. So just from that statistic you can see that recycling is not going to help. Trees can take hundreds of years to grow and according to various reports (including the video below) the world will be completely deforested within 100 years if we continue cutting down forests at this pace. With world populations growing and more developing countries emerging (China + India) this is likely to be cut short drastically.
Did you know that China use approximately 80% of the worlds concrete? That sounds like a lot of offices and apartments to me, which I guarantee will in turn mean more letters, more paper, more desks, more doors therefore more wood. Remembering this is just one country.
How much paper and/or things made from wood do you see every day? If you are reading this it means you are on a computer or a mobile device, what was it packaged in? cardboard? Have you got a pen and paper, or a newspaper by your side?
I can’t claim to be perfect. The way my life has been sculpted for me means there is no way for me to avoid paper and wood even if I tried. For my job I would have to sign a contract, probably would have applied through the post, sat at a desk for my interview and walked through many many doors made of wood.
So what is the answer? I hate to think that so much forest land is being destroyed but what can I really do to make a difference? I already recycle at every opportunity I get, is that enough?
If the world was to instantly stop cutting down wood, it would cause problems for all in developed countries. We would completely lose the ability to communicate through written correspondence. Fair enough we could use email but when you think that in the UK alone the Royal Mail delivers more than 80 million letters per day – I think it would cause some disruption if it suddenly stopped. I wonder how much all the paper delivered on a daily basis worldwide would be in terms of forest land 
.
Think about the size of the grass area inside an athletics track.. Now multiply that by 20,000.. Too big? Well that is the land area that is being cut down by humans around the world on a daily basis! I can’t even imagine what a place so big would look like! So just imagine all the wildlife that is destroyed in the process. I can’t imagine the drivers of the diggers getting out to move monkeys and birds from the trees before axing them down to be honest.
It really is unbelievable that I can feel so helpless over something as big as this.
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