Biodiversity and Conservation: A Hypertext Book by Peter J. Bryant

Chapter 15: TEMPERATE FORESTS AND DEFORESTATION

Registered UCI students: view the slide show for this chapter or download it: http://darwin.bio.uci.edu:80/~sustain/protected/chap15slides.ppt

"The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the Common
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the Common from the goose"

-- Anonymous response in 1764 to Sir Charles Pratt's fencing of common land (Thanks to US Fish and Wildlife Service for finding this!)

DEFORESTATION

In the last 5,000 years, humans have reduced forests from roughly 50% of the earth's land surface to less than 20%. If deforestation continues at present rates, Thailand will have no forest left in 25 years; the Philippines in less than 20 years, and Nepal in 15 years. And in most places the rate of deforestation is increasing.

Many of the large areas of grassland in the world, such as the savannas of Africa, the steppes of eastern Europe and Russia, the pampas of Argentina, and at least some of the prairies of North America, were forested before human disturbance. In the drier areas of the world such as North Africa, Greece, Italy, and Australia, the deforested areas have subsequently been overgrazed, and have lost soil so rapidly that they have turned to desert (desertification).  The UN in 2000 reported that half of all land in South Asia has lost agricultural potential because of desertification.

As a result of deforestation and poor forest management, about ten percent of the world's 80-100,000 tree species are in danger of extinction, according to a 1998 report by World Wildlife Fund.

Replanting is done on only a fraction of the deforested area, and it usually creates a monoculture plantation, with much less biological diversity (both plant and animal) and less disease resistance than in virgin, or old-growth forest.
Rainforest, Forest and Biodiversity Conservation News & Information

TEMPERATE FORESTS

The U.S. Forest Service

Timber Sale Exclusions

A recent lawsuit has revealed another USFS strategy for promoting timber sales at the expense of environmental considerations.  Timber harvests that removed 250,000 board feet or less of merchantable wood products, or salvage activities that removed 1,000,000 board feet or less of merchantable wood products, were exempted from the review requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).  So the USFS simply subdivided the sales in order to make the individual sales exempt. 

Logging outside the U.S.

Since the timber companies have been running into difficulties in the U.S., they have been turning to other countries where the laws are more in their favor. Both Weyerhauser and the Korean Hyundai Corporation are logging extensively in the northeast corner of Russia, where the economy is extremely depressed and the people are in great need of jobs and income. This is destroying some of the only remaining habitat of the Siberian Tiger, a species whose population is only about 300 and that faces serious threats from poaching.

The Siberian tiger is also jeopardized by forest fires that burned out of control for over three months in 1998. The Siberian northern boreal forests, called Taiga, where the fires were burning are mainly spruce and fir trees. These forests are twice the size of the Amazon rain forest and contain about a quarter of the world's timber reserves. The fires reached the Sihote-Alin wildlife reserve, one of the last remaining refuges for the Siberian Tiger.  Partly a result of a very dry year, the fires devastated  over 50,000 square miles of forest, including about two-thirds of the island of Sakhalin.

The attention on the forest fires is obscuring another serious problem - the smuggling of valuable cedar, elm, and ash to China, Korea, and Japan. Illegal logging has soared over the past decade, especially since borders opened after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Illegal logging is practically equal to forest fires in terms of its threat to the taiga, says Vladimir Shetinin, deputy chairman of the Primorsky regions State Committee on Environmental Protection, based in Vladivostok.

U.S. timber giant Boise Cascade has shut down mills in the Pacific Northwest and now has plans to construct a huge wood mill in Chile's temperate rain forest.  More than a third of the world's remaining temperate rainforests are in Southern Chile, and the "siempreverde" coastal temperate rainforest that is threatened by the Boise Cascade mill has the highest levels of biodiversity of all of Chile's forests.

British Columbia's timber industry has lost money three years in a row, leading to closure of 10 sawmills, one plywood mill and one pulp mill in 1998. In response, the industry is calling for less government regulation of the industry.  Recent controversy has focused on the spectacular Clayoquot Sound, which has already suffered from extensive clearcutting.
Weyerhaeuser commitment to Great Bear questioned | West Fraser -- Raw Log Exports

What you can do

The Heartwood organization has prepared a guide to help people to get involved in protecting their public forests. 

Additional reading

Forest News | Taiga News | GREEN TEA TIME: Nature conservation in Japan and trees of the world

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Copyright ©2002 Peter J. Bryant (pjbryant@uci.edu), School of Biological Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. Phone (949) 824-4714 Fax (949) 824-3571 A Project of the Interdisciplinary Minor in Global Sustainability