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Quotes about Deforestation from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"At the same time that I'm experiencing this bewildering neurochemical reaction, I'm constantly being presented with dismaying evidence of overlogging. The deforestation of Borneo has reduced the tree cover by more than half over the past fifty years. Driving through the country's heartland, I see decimated, defiled, embarrassed landscapes. The hillsides are covered in bald spots. Deep swaths are cut through the wilderness. Vast expanses of rain forest have been razed for palm-oil plantations. Nearly 13 percent of Malaysia is now covered in squat palm trees." - Adam Leith Gollne, The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce and Obsession (Get the book.)

"Large-scale deforestation in the Amazon Basin has led to soil erosion and flooding. Epidemic diseases have resulted from the displacement of forest peoples by economic activity. Recently, the Indonesian government resettled nearly seven million people and cleared 4 percent of the country's forests in the process. Many of these settlers later fled back to city slums after floods, massive soil erosion, and constant crop failures. The political and social tensions arising from issues of sustainability have led to rebellions in many parts of the world." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "The same dry conditions pummeled crop yields just as the cumulative effects of centuries of overexploitation of fragile and marginal soils, widespread deforestation, and sheet erosion took their toll. When it did rain, the torrential downpours swept away unprotected soil. Kingship faltered in the face of drought and restless, hungry commoners. The elaborate superstructure of city-states collapsed like a stack of cards. Some of the greatest Maya cities dissolved in violence and social revolution within a few generations." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Widespread deforestation resulting from overgrazing, garden clearance, and continual demands for firewood transformed local landscapes and eroded the soil. The cleared land would support many more people, but at a high environmental price. In marginal areas for farming, people were at continual risk from short-term climatic swings from the start, even more so when farmers used up all uncleared land and reduced field rotation cycles to feed more people." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.) "He established that monsoon droughts do not result from human environmental modification, such as deforestation. In a memorable paper published in 1910, he examined rainfall data from India and the Nile Valley and concluded there was no evidence that India's disastrous droughts had been caused by permanent climate change. In the same year he wrote in the Memoirs of the Indian Meteorological Service: "The variations of monsoon rainfall . . . occur on so large a scale [that we can assume they are] preceded and followed by abnormal conditions at some distance." - Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"The result was deforestation. The faster humanity developed, the more rapidly the forests disappeared. In Europe trees were felled to provide both fuel and timber, and the cleared areas became fields (the word is derived from felled) to grow food for the swelling population. As the European forests dwindled, the forests of North America were plundered. The ships that brought the early settlers over from Europe went back laden with timber for the new railways and factories. Today, less than 20 percent of the earth remains forested; yet our demand for wood is greater than it has ever been." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.) "Water vapor itself is a greenhouse gas; as the air becomes warmer and more moist, the heat trapped in the tropical regions will increase even further. deforestation does not help, either; it reduces the biosphere's capacity to absorb carbon dioxide. Moreover, the warmer the world becomes, the faster dead vegetation will decay, both on land and in the sea, further speeding the release of greenhouse gases. As a result of these and other feedback loops, the earth's temperature may rise much more rapidly than we initially suspected." - Peter Russell, Waking Up In Time: Finding Inner Peace In Times of Accelerating Change (Get the book.)

"This strategy is not about the ethics of eating animals, being the highest carnivore on the food chain, or deforestation of the Amazon to raise cattle. Rather, it is about finding the balance of animal protein to green plants in your diet that is right for you. You may transition to a near total vegephile existence in your Diet Evolution, or you may decide that all you are comfortable with is one meatless day a week. The choice is yours." - Dr. Steven R. Gundry, Dr. Gundry's Diet Evolution: Turn Off the Genes That Are Killing You - And Your Waistline - And Drop the Weight for Good (Get the book.)

"Costa Rica, Latin America's oldest and longest-running democracy, was in trouble, with one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. It was a catastrophe in the making. The combination of international debts at high interest rates, rising unemployment, and national economic depression brought on by stifling international profiteering as one of America's preeminent banana republics led the Costa Rican government to embark on a campaign of rapid deforestation, for cheap timber and to raise cattle, as a means of raising foreign currency. It was a road to oblivion." - David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.)

"Cooking is a major reason for deforestation. In Africa, the tropical forests of the mountain gorilla are being cut and cleared for cooking wood. Similar tragedies are happening on nearly every continent. In third world countries, the cooking of food exposes people to the hazards of inhaling wood smoke or emissions from biomass fuels, such as cattle chips (dung). Emissions from wood and biomass fuels are major sources of air pollution in the home and are the number one source of air pollution outside the home (even eclipsing fossil fuels)." - David Wolfe, The Sunfood Diet Success System (Get the book.)

"Environmental Refugees mmaw Even if we succeed in calming the violence that has displaced so many, human activity is making the planet a more hostile and unforgiving place: deforestation and soil erosion have rendered barren much of the best cropland; overpopulation has forced large numbers of people to live in precarious situations; and, most direly, humankind has been changing the climate. Climate change may prove to be the ultimate humanitarian disaster." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.) "In rural communities throughout many African countries, one major cause of deforestation is the growing demand for coffins to bury victims of AIDS. Traditional mourning rites involve all-night vigils, which add to the problem by requiring an enormous amount of firewood for heat and light. Aside from the trees, native medicinal plants are rapidly depleting, because of individual efforts to seek free, readily available treatments for HIV and AIDS. The threat on nontimber-forest resources compounds both the problem and the pursuit of a solution." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.)

"There is still time to slow down, perhaps even to stop the present trend of tropical deforestation. We find some comfort in history. The present cycle of deforestation in tropical America is not the first. Not only were there the cycles of natural deforestation and reforestation during the Pleistocene that led to much of the present diversity of tropical rain forest, but the impact of pre-Columbian civilizations was also considerable." - Adrian Forsyth and Kenneth Miyata, Tropical Nature: Life and Death in the Rain Forests of Central and South America (Get the book.)

"The use of Agent Orange as a jungle defoliant in Vietnam was the ultimate in instant deforestation. What the world is saying back to the United States in essence is "Actions speak louder than words." On March 19, 1989, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific released a study blaming most of Asia's 1988 "natural disasters" (How strange to call them "natural"!) primarily on deforestation. "The phenomena of floods, mudslides, even earth quakes can be directly related to deforestation," the United Nations report stated." - Dr Bernard Jenson and Mark Anderson, Empty Harvest (Get the book.)

"Researchers also found evidence for accelerated soil erosion caused by extensive deforestation of sloping land in the Mayan lowlands. Where Mayan terraces remain intact, they hold three to four times more soil than lies on adjacent cultivated slopes. Development of erosion control methods allowed the Mayan heartland to support large populations but the expansion depended on intensive cultivation of erosion-prone slopes and sedimentation-prone wetlands. Eventually, Mayan civilization reached a point where its agricultural methods could no longer sustain its population." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Extensive deforestation and plowing of the Campagna increased hillslope erosion to the point that antierosion channels were built to stabilize hillside farms. Despite such efforts, sediment-choked rivers turned valley bottoms into waterlogged marshes as plows advanced up the surrounding slopes. Malaria became a serious concern about 200 bc when silt eroded from cultivated uplands clogged the Tiber River and the agricultural valley that centuries before supported more than a dozen towns became the infamous Pontine Marshes." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.) "Historians blame many culprits for the demise of once flourishing cultures: disease, deforestation, and climate change to name a few. While each of these factors played varying—and sometimes dominant—roles in different cases, historians and archaeologists rightly tend to dismiss single-bullet theories for the collapse of civilizations. Today's explanations invoke the interplay among economic, environmental, and cultural forces specific to particular regions and points in history. But any society's relationship to its land—how people treat the dirt beneath their feet—is fundamental, literally." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"It does not therefore require much imagination to understand why 'deforestation diesel' almost certainly has a worse impact on global warming than its conventional mineral counterpart: estimates have suggested that biodiesel based on palm oil feedstock can be ten times more carbon-intensive than fossil fuels. If we leave biofuels and nuclear out of any prospective energy portfolio because of their obvious drawbacks, we can still get our seven wedges in other ways. We need to halve the distances people drive each year, and we need to double vehicle fuel economy." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.)

"The demand for these wood stoves contributes to deforestation. The smoke they produce leads to respiratory disease, especially in children. Worldwide, cooking-related indoor air pollution kills more people than cigarettes do, according to the British NGO Practical Action's 2004 report "Smoke: The Killer in the Kitchen." Finding better solutions for cooking food is one of the biggest design-for-development challenges. Luckily, better solutions are starting to appear." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.)

"Most of the mountains are classed by ecologists as pristine, isolated as they are from human impacts like fire and deforestation, which threaten biodiversity elsewhere. But this very isolation has bred vulnerability. The shape i HKfcri 1J £, (j K £ £, s of the mountains, as a scattered archipelago of islands a thousand metres above a wider plain, ensures that most species can't migrate between them. Their flat tops mean that plants will be unable to move further uphill if climate change brings temperatures higher than they can tolerate." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.) "The human population encroaching on the forest has increased tenfold in the last half-century, and each new road the Brazilian government forges into pristine areas is quickly surrounded by new 'herringbone' patterns of deforestation. Slash-and-burn agriculture is also a serious threat, as half a million land-hungry peasants converge on Brazil's last great wilderness in search of a better living for themselves and their families." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.) "Kilimanjaro's international celebrity status has also attracted the attention of climate change deniers, who suggest that deforestation on the mountain's lower slopes is more to blame for glacial retreat than global warming. None of the contrarian rhetoric cuts any ice, so to speak, with Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University and a man who is deservedly one of America's most celebrated natural scientists." - Mark Lynas, Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (Get the book.)

"In the 1990s geographers studying small deptessions, known as bajos, around Mayan sites in northwestern Belize found rhat cultivated wetlands had filled with soils eroded after deforestation of the surrounding slopes. The southern Yucatan is broken into depressions that formed natural wetlands extensively cultivated during the peak of Mayan civilization. Trenches revealed buried soils dating from the pre-Mayan period covered by two and a half to six feet of dirt eroded from the surrounding slopes in two distinct episodes." - David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations (Get the book.)

"The combination of international debts at high interest rates, rising unemployment, and national economic depression brought on by stifling international profiteering as one of America's preeminent banana republics led the Costa Rican government to embark on a campaign of rapid deforestation, for cheap timber and to raise cattle, as a means of raising foreign currency. It was a road to oblivion. Costa Rica's climate was not conducive to raising catde, and the country was destroying its real assets for short-term gains to pay off the stifling international debt." - David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.) "Of course, this could be accelerated, and may be 'short-circuited' by direct human deforestation," say the researchers in the Nature article. Wangari Maathai wanted to create a sustainable supply of fuel wood for rural African women while halting soil erosion and other threatening forms of environmental degradation." - David Steinman, Safe Trip to Eden: Ten Steps to Save Planet Earth from the Global Warming Meltdown (Get the book.)

"Jungle deforestation is halted and recovery measures put in place. Companies found ways of neutralizing their waste, using less fuel and employing alternative energy sources. Public transportation and new clean fuel sources curbed the demand and need for burning fossil fuels. People learned how to make do with a little less in order to preserve energy and natural resources. Polar ice packs and glaciers around the world are solid once again, or are becoming so." - Jackie Lapin, The Art of Conscious Creation: How You Can Transform the World (Get the book.) "Forests and jungles around the world are protected from logging and deforestation that endangers their abundance and re-growth. The demand for wood is declining as we have found new ways to build without overusing wood in building and design. Reservoirs and lakes are back to their former levels, providing water for drinking, recreation and sustainable natural beauty. Rivers flow freely and unpolluted. Beaches are clean of contaminants and debris, leaving them once again a healthy place to play, walk and meditate." - Jackie Lapin, The Art of Conscious Creation: How You Can Transform the World (Get the book.)

"Both large-scale livestock farming and the massive fish farms that dot our coasts destroy the environment: they cause air and water pollution, deforestation, and depletion of fossil-fuel resources. Some people choose vegetarianism as a way to take a personal stand against destructive factory ranching and farming practices, but for most people, a meat-free lifestyle has no appeal; meat tastes good, plays an integral role in traditional cuisine, and makes up a significant portion of some basic diets." - Alex Steffen, Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century (Get the book.)

"It is feared that deforestation will lead to the extinction of numerous plant species before their medicinal uses have been recorded or validated. Even among those plants that have known medicinal uses, many have not been investigated scientifically in any detail for their chemical constituents or biological effects. Having spent a career investigating the chemistry of plants and the biological activities of their constituents, it is salutary to be faced with the 'benefit of hindsight'. To some extent, the investigating scientist is trapped in the laboratory with the techniques of the day." - Dr. Michael Heinrich, Joanne Barnes, Simon Gibbons and Elizabeth M. Williamson, Fundamentals of Pharmacognosy and Phytotherapy (Get the book.)

"The total amount required to address mounting global problems—to provide global health care, eliminate starvation and malnutrition, provide clean water and shelter for all, remove land mines, eliminate nuclear weapons, stop deforestation, prevent global warming, ozone depletion and acid rain, retire the paralyzing debt of developing nations, prevent soil erosion, produce safe, clean America, as a nation, energies, stop overpopulation and eliminate illitera- spends six cents out cy —would be one-third that amount, in the neigh- of every dollar on borhood of $237.5 billion. educating its chil- ." - APC Books, Healing Our Planet, Healing Our Selves: The Power of change Within to Change the World (Get the book.)

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