Final Research Paper- Deforestation Intro

Forest Massacre

“Give me a land of boughs in leaf, A land of trees that stand; Where trees are fallen there is grief; I love no leafless land” (A.E. Housman). In my proposal I wrote that my research paper was going to be about mountain watershed and how people need mountains for survival. But as I was looking into all the environmental situations deforestation caught my attention the most.
Deforestation is the destroying of forests. Deforestation happens for multiple of reasons. People do this because development of cash crops and cattle ranching, both of which earn money for tropical countries. There is also commercial logging which supplies the world with certain woods. When commercial logging companies do this they destroy trees as well as opening up forest for agriculture. If the destroying of forests doesn’t stop it could take a serious toll on Earth’s resources. These devastating consequences include social conflict, extinction of plants and animals, and drastic climate changes.
The logging industry is fueled by the need for deposable products. “11 million acres a year are cut for commercial and property industries” (National Geographic News). Peter Heller (environmentalist) found that McDonald’s needs 800 square miles of trees to make the amount of paper they need for a year’s supply of packaging. Entity Mission found that British Columbia manufactures 7,500,000 pairs of chopsticks a day. “The logging industry not only tries to accomplish all this but it even indirectly helps the “shifted cultivators” and others to do more damage. The roads that the loggers build to access the forests and generate hydroelectric power create an easy way for many people to try to manipulate the forest resources. The amount of damage that this adds to the forests cannot be measured nor can that of the illegal logging. Some importers may even be buying illegally logged wood and not even known it” (Rochen 2009).