When you start this reading this chapter, Betsy McCully makes it very clear that deforestation is not a new phenomena in human civilization. Whole forests in Europe were completely depleted prior to the discovery of the New World. Even the virgin forests in the North-East of the American colonies lost many of their trees quickly as neither colonizers nor royal agents followed laws that were passed to prevent the deforestation that occurred in Europe and England to happen again in America.
However, what surprised me was not that deforestation has been around for a long period of time or that even continued to destroy forests around them even though they knew that deforestation was a real long term problem. What was really mind boggling was the rate at which deforestation occurred. You might not be shocked at modern statistics with regards to deforestation, especially given the amount of technology that is available to us now a days. However, McCully mentions that the Duffield Forrest in England lost over 57,000 large oak trees and 29,000 small oak trees in a span of twenty-seven years. With the technology available, that rate has skyrocketed yet even the old rate of deforestation was mind boggling. It seems that humans almost mindlessly destroy nature around them without any thought of the consequences.
It is not even the case of people not knowing the consequences of deforestation. As early as 1587, there were books available that talked about the long-term negatives of destroying forests. Forests might just be natural evolution of the land around us, but they have a lot of secondary benefits to humans that are almost never considered such as: “controlling avalanches, mountain torrents, shifting sands, erosion, and silation.” Forests especially benefit nearby farmland and subsequent overgrazing of deforested land often prevents that land from being usable in the long-term. The reality is that people throughout history have often been aware of the negative consequences of their actions with regards to nature and yet have done nothing about it. Human interaction with nature and deforestation in particular has gotten worse with time.
