Edit: Yes, the indigenous peoples also cut down trees for agricultural purposes, and even practiced forestry-by-fire. They did so at a radically different scale, however, and it wasn't the loggers' wanton "cut it down and move on to the next patch".
To wit: "Timber production soared from one billion board feet in 1840 to 46 billion board feet in 1904... By 1880, lumber had overtaken agriculture as the most important driver of deforestation. By 1920, more than two-thirds of American forests had been leveled at least once, including the vast majority of eastern forests. Timber companies simply harvested the forest and moved on, from the Great Lakes to the South and across the West, leaving behind stumps, fire prone slash and dead or dying lumber towns. Finally, they were stopped by the Pacific Ocean and forced to begin replanting practices." [1]
Contrast that with, e.g., "the Cahokia people in Illinois (800-700 BP) cut one million trees to house 25,000 people. They also surrounded the village with a two-mile-long stockade composed of 15,000 oak and hickory logs 21 feet tall. Add all the trees they cut for fuel, and it wasn’t long before the Cahokia had leveled the forest within nine miles of their village." [ibid]
There is no reasonable comparison between the strictly localized activities of tribal peoples and industrial logging.
[1] https://www.americanforests.org/magazine/article/north-ameri...
Source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/31/new-england-see...
It is so friggen' obvious what happens when we don't project the environment, I can't figure out why people are so naive.
Or they need to learn how to attract investment rather than feel-good NGOs who exacerbate the issue of corruption and dependence on foreign aid.
Our economy is stagnating, and as our growth stagnates, politics becomes a zero sum game. Our radical environmentalism is creating a world that no longer accepts change in the world outside of bits.
If you're concerned about economic growth you would be better looking at inequality. Of course Peter Thiel is not going to mention that.
Poachers kill protected predators such as L. Lynx purely out of pride†, and as soon as wolves come anywhere near possibly even remotely like rumoured to be coming around people go up in arms OMG-please-people-think-of-the-children-and-sheep-we-have-to-obliterate-the-thing-out-of-existence.
† Lynx can kill comparatively sizeable prey (up to 5x their weight!), so they typically leave the carcass in place and come back some days later, so all the poachers have to do is spot a carcass in the woods, stay downwind, gun down the poor unsuspecting fella from a distance, and brag about their awsum top-of-the-food-chain I'm-a-super-predator-killing-a-definitely-terrifying-predator†† leet skillz.
†† Seriously, it's a beautiful, easily frightened cat that is a real ninja and scared as hell of humans. Zero threat, and zero pride to be taken in mowing down a sitting duck.
Still thank you for your answer, I didn't know about the quotas.
Why is it less fun? At least on The east coast forests are making a comeback. The Moors are still as bald as they have been for 3000 years
If you don't know how Australia and Scotland went from heavily forested to... not, I have bad news about indigenous peoples.
It's not like they abstained from doing it on moral grounds or based on superior wisdom.
Many also weren't, of course, but it's silly to make a blanket proclamation that because they were primitive, they were also stupid.
A lifestyle that does not easily accommodate mass deforestation has a lot of benefits, intentional or otherwise. I'm not arguing that we should all strive to be hunter-gatherers, but there are a lot of ways modern life could go really wrong in the next thousand years and it would be good to be mindful of those pitfalls.
I also sleep much better despite the insect noise than here in the city. Will take cicadas and crickets over helicopters, fire engines, etc. any day.
Where I'm from (Northern Ireland) is historically forest, but exploitation over the last 1000 years has turned it bare and mostly into agricultural land.
There's a tiny patch of jaw-droppingly beautiful forest on the Beara Peninsula. The last time I was there I saw sheep had gotten loose and were grazing inside it. If that continues it will be the death of it :-(.
There are large parts of the arc from South East London to South West London that have large areas with tree lined roads and woodland areas everywhere.
[1]http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/geography/glacial_...
Hipster Britain: we were Brazil before it was mainstream.
Not to be confused with erinaceous (pertaining to hedgehogs) plants.
Cacti, perhaps? English vocabulary can be weird.
Replanting some evergreen trees is a way to help the forest kickstart recovery on old strip mine wreckage.
There was a hard layer half a meter or so beneath the top soil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardpan
so with deep plow or in many cases back-breaking work, the land was made fertile again. And yes, pulverized chalk is one of the methods used to raise the pH.
It's not high-quality farming land, often too much sand and too little peat.
Nowadays the little heath left in Denmark is usually protected. It'll usually turn to forest if left alone with no grazing.
The estates that owned them called them waste as nothing would grow there. Generally they are used for very low density livestock farming and most is common land.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2016/j...
tldr - forest was cleared by about 2000-1500BC primarily for grazing although some evidence of cereal being grown. However, by 1000-1BC the climate deteriorated and spread of peat led to abandonment of higher moor.
Climatic improvement in early medieval times led to re-occupation, but by mid-1300's the population had moved again to better land. Black Death reduced Devon's population by 2/3 and meant that if you survived you went and farmed better land.
Farming is still hard on Dartmoor, driven by soil and weather. For example Princetown is 23Km and 400 metres away from Plymouth, but rainfall doubles from about 1000mm to 2000mm per annum.