Forest.!

In environmental class an issue that we came across was about deforestation. After European settlement forests have decreased around the world. As time has progress deforestation has increased more and more. About 300 million acres of forests have been cleared due to agriculture in the 19^th century according to this article (Forests). Also, one-third of the nation is forested; also how before the European settlement, forest covered about 1 billion acres of what is now the United States. Today there are many causes of forest loss such as urbanization, conversion to agriculture, reservoir construction, and natural disasters (Environment). For example, coniferous forests on the eastern and western regions mostly are coniferous forests.

About ten million private individuals own about 422 million of acres of forest and other woodland. Furthermore, most public forest land is run by four Federal agencies known as the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Service, and Fish and Wildlife Service. Today many forests are use for many purposes. Some are use for timber production, recreation, hunting, fishing, watershed and fish’s protection, wildlife habitat and biodiversity protection, and obtaining products to aid to the medicine field.

            In the class, I learned about degradation of habitats. With this said, I learn that in conservation biology was invented as scientist were seeing that their natural systems were extinguishing; therefore scientists began to find solutions to restore our natural systems such as forest. Within that forest, we find biodiversity, most public land is owned by federal agencies and one of those agencies is Wild Life and Biodiversity Protection. From our class, we learn that biodiversity is essential for stabilizing a population. There can be diversity at many levels such as ecosystem, species, and at the genetic diversity. All three played a major role in environmental science today. Another main causes of forest loss and that correlates to biodiversity loss in that by getting rid of forest we are making species vulnerable to extinction, as we are destroying their habitats. And since biodiversity offers free ecosystem services we may destroy all these services. Ecosystem services gives us food, shelter, fuel, purifies air and water, and detoxifies wastes, stabilizes climate, moderates floods, droughts, wind, temperature.

            This is an issue that everyone should be aware of it. As our population is increasing rapidly, there would be the need to cut down more forests for human use. We must observe this very carefully and avoid doing it, and find other ways to make room for more people to live on this planet Earth. If we don’t start to worry about this depletion of forests, soon all the trees might be gone, and more problems would occur, one of them being that there wouldn’t be oxygen for us humans. Humans should get to act quickly and begin to care more about our environment because soon if one ecosystem collapses then everything collapses. It’s a domino effect. We humans must prevent that at all costs.