Side Effects

  • Biggest road-building agency in the world: U.S. Forest Service
  • Thousands of dollars spent per mile to build a major logging road: 45
  • Thousans of dollars per mile for secondary logging road: 15
  • Millions of people who cannot get the fuelwood they need each day, even be overcutting the forests around them: 100
  • Number of days a year women and children in some parts of the world spend searching for fuelwood: 100 to 300
  • Number of times more money earned by selling fruit, cocoa, and rubber from an Amazonian forest tract then by selling all its trees as timber: 6
  • Number of times more money earned by selling fruit, cocoa, and rubber from and Amazonian forest tract than by turning it into cattle pasture: 2
  • Number of people evacuated due to deforestation-related flloding in the Philippines in 1981: 331,000
  • Millions of tons of topsoil lost annually on Indonesia's island of Java, which has just 15 percent of its original forest cover: 770
  • Number of years of sevice that are regularly lost from hydroelectric dams as a result of sedimentation caused by deforestation: 25 to 50
  • Billions of tons of carbon dioxide released in 1987 due to forest clearing and other changes in land use: 3
  • Percentage of annual human-bases carbon dioxide emissions that is accounted for by deforestation: 33
  • Portion fo Earth's deforestation-based carbon dioxide emissions that come from Brazil, Indonesia, Colombia, and Ivory Coast and Thailand: one-half
  • Billions of tons of carbon dioxide that could be absorbed annually by 800,000 square miles of young forest: 1
    Miller and Tangley, xv-xxi

    And links to forest facts,Our Species facts, Side effects and Homepage

    Stephanie Heller
    966-8154
    E-Mail Address

    Copyright & copy; 1996, Stephanie Heller