U.S. Losing Trees Fast – Especially in the Southeast

The U.S. Forest Service and industry representatives are pushing the Globe Timber sale under the guise of creating new habitat. While they are planning to cut the small percentage of healthy, mature and old-growth forest we have left, studies are being conducted that show the United States is being led for the world in deforesting their land the quickest.  Not only that, but the greatest amount of forest lost was in the Southeast.  Are you willing to stand by while industry representatives and timber companies continue to plunder the forests?  If you’re upset about this, speak up and get involved.  Come to our next protest on May 10th in Asheville.  For news on deforestation in the U.S. read the article below:

U.S. losing trees faster than other heavily forested nations

By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY

Out of seven of the most heavily forested nations on Earth, the United States experienced a greater percentage of forest loss from 2000

to  2005 than did any of the other countries, a study said Monday.

The United States lost more than 46,000 square miles of forest in those years, a size roughly equivalent to the state of Pennsylvania.  That’s  about 6% of the nation’s forested land.

“That’s the most of the seven countries that have over 1 million square kilometers of forest,” says study lead author Matthew Hansen of South Dakota State University.  Worldwide, researchers determined that the globe lost forest cover of nearly 400,000 square miles — roughly 3% of the world’s forested

areas — during the first half of the last decade. The other countries in the study were Canada,Russia, China,  Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the forest loss was the result of both human and natural causes.

“We do not quantify what the causes are, and we do not quantify how much forest gain there was from 2000 to 2005,” Hansen says. “But clearly, industrial harvesting/clearing is very important.”  Man-made causes of forest loss include logging and wildfires caused by people.   Natural causes would include natural wildfires and storm damage.  The one part of the contiguous USA that experienced the most forest loss was the Southeast, a large chunk of which lost more than 10% of its forest cover from 2000 to 2005, the year for which the most recent data were available.