Since beginning farming, man has been felling woodland to get more land for cultivation.
Plato wrote of the Attica heights outside Athens that they resemble “the skeleton of a body waste by disease” as a result of deforestation.
Europe has lost 50-70 percent of its original forest. Much of the continent’s forests were felled in the early Middle Ages, to provide either more agricultural land or firewood.
Half of France’s forest disappeared between 1000 and 1300. The Black Death wiped out one third of Europe’s population in the Middle of the fourteenth century, receiving pressure on the forests, which in many cases grew back again.
It was not until the 1500s and 1600s that an ever increasing number of people again put the forests under pressure and more large areas of it were felled.
By 1700, France’s forests had been reduced in size by more thank 70 percent compared to 1000 CE.
In eighteenth centaury, however, people became aware of the fact that the forests were became limited resource and that they were important for naval shipbuilding purposes.
For this reason area in Europe only fell by about 8 percent from 1700 onward.
The US has only lost approximately 30 percent of its original area, most of this happening in the nineteenth century.
The lost has been higher mainly because population pressure has never been as great there as in Europe.
The doubling of US farmland from 1880 to 1920 happened almost without affecting the total forests are as most was converted from grassland.
On the other hand, many regions of the world experienced increased deforestation in the nineteenth century.
Latin America became part of the world economy at an early stage and has cleared approximately 20 percent of its forest cover over the last 300 years.
Much of it went to make way for sugar and later coffee although a gold and diamond fever, which started in 1690, also helped to clear approximately 2 percent of the forests in Brazil.
Asia, which has long had intensive farming, joined the world economy relatively late. It was not until the American Civil War and the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 that India began to export cotton on a large scale.
All in all, southern Asia and China have lost about 50 percent of their forest cover since 1700.
Southeast Asia, on the other hand has only lost 7 percent over the last 300 years, while Africa and Russia have each lost a little under 20 percent.
Globally it is estimated that we have lost a total about 20 percent of the original forest cover since the dawn of agriculture.
This figure is far smaller than the one so often bandied about by the various organizations.
Forests and History
