The Vital Role of Forests

by Read Listen Learn


Forests

“A nation that destroys its soil destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.”

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, former US President.

Forest: anywhere that has a high concentration of trees, any kind of tree. Of course, ‘high concentration’ is a loose term and there is no fixed standard. A wood is usually thought of as smaller than a forest but it all depends where you are. Some areas in Russia, called ‘woods’, would be vast forests in Europe. Then there is rain forest and jungle – both tropical – but the word ‘forest’ includes them all.

In these times of ecological crisis, it is trite to say that the world’s forests are its lungs but they really are that important. The forests clean up and cool down our atmosphere. They give off steam in the day, putting water back in the system in the form of clouds. They are also home to an incredible number of plants and animals. The common chicken is originally a jungle bird; and rubber and aspirin are taken from jungle plants.

As we have said, jungle is not the only kind of forest, far from it. In non-tropical regions, there are pine forests, both highland and lowland; and deciduous forests that include trees which lose their leaves in winter.

Returning to the tropical forests, rain forest has a high, tree-top roof which cuts out sunlight to the forest floor and means that few plants grow there between the long, tall trunks. Jungle, on the other hand, does not have this tree roof or ‘canopy’ and so the jungle floor is thick with plant life; in places so thick that it is impossible to walk through.

This is rarely a problem in northern deciduous forests, and pure pine forests are positively sterile with almost nothing growing between the trees and very few animals, even small ones, making their homes there.

Forest once covered almost all of the world’s land but, as the earth dried, so the forests thinned and gave way to plains and parkland. This deforestation speeded up when humans discovered how to use fire and how to make axes. As human beings were forced to turn to farming, the deforestation happened even faster as people cleared large areas of forest to plant the new crops.

At first, this land stolen from the forest by burning, is fertile and productive, in part because the ash from the burnt trees and bushes enriches the soil. But, in just one or two years, the soil becomes almost useless and people move on to chop and burn down another area. While the population is low, the forest can grow back in time but, as it increases, so the forest begins to disappear more and more quickly.

Which brings us to the human-forest relationship. There is some debate about the most natural habitat for early human beings but everyone agrees that, as a species, we have spent a lot of evolutionary time living in, or very near, different kinds of forest.

The human beings most physically adapted to living in forests are the Pygmies of the Congo in central Africa. Hundreds of generations of living deep in the rain forest have caused the Pygmies to become much shorter and smaller. A very short, light person can run through forest more easily than a tall, heavy one and also climb higher or further out along a branch. Most humans are not so well adapted to forest life and have preferred living on the edge of a forest or in large clearings in it. In this way, human beings can use the resources of the forest by day – gathering fruit or hunting and trapping animals – but avoid the many dangers of passing the night among the trees.

However, if enemies threaten, it is to the nearby forest that people run, with their animals, to hide. The forest was and is both a place of danger and a place of safety which is perhaps why it is a frequent feature of fairy stories and folk tales, where it presents endless possibilities for discussing good, bad and the unknown.

Robin Hood, a real person by the way, could not have survived without Sherwood Forest to hide in and, even in modern times, guerrilla armies always do better where there are large jungles or forests nearby, from Vietnam to the Ukraine to Colombia. But, as the forests shrink, bandits and guerrilla fighters have fewer places to hide.

And the forests are still shrinking. One main reason is the logging and timber industry. So many things, from matches to bridges, from spoons to houses, are made, at least in part, of wood. As if this were not enough, most of the world’s paper, and there is a lot of paper used these days, comes from breaking trees down into a kind of powder.

The result is that the Amazon jungle, the Congo basin forest and all the other forests of the world, great or small, are disappearing. We are told that an area the size of Wales or Massachusetts or Switzerland is being cut down in the Amazon every year but we find it hard to stop and still live our modern lives the way we like. We are ripping out our own lungs and, if we don’t stop soon, the earth will get sick and we, the human race, will die. If we cannot save the forests, we cannot save ourselves.