Forest conservation is an incredibly relevant issue in the pacific northwest nowadays. Global warming and climate change are some of the most important issues that face our society nowadays because no matter what differences or conflicts there are between people, changes to the environment affects everyone. Forest conservation is the removal or clearance of a forest to later be converted into buildings meant for commercialized usage. It is an issue that is very relevant in Oregon because of the absurdly high number of trees and forests that the state inhabits.
Forest conservation is enacted in many forms. Fires, clear-cutting, ranching development and logging for timber are all huge contributing factors to this issue. The Los Angeles Times wrote an article about the issue in April of 2017 giving two eye-opening statistics about the situation of forest conservation in our world. “Since 1990 the world has lost the equivalent of 1,000 football fields of forests every hour, according to World Bank development indicators from last year. That’s 1.3 million square kilometers of forest, an area larger than South Africa, according to the international financial institution.” The issue of forest conservation is important now more than ever.
Forest conservation has been an issue for as long as humans have been cutting down trees. Trees provide many things for humans; warmth, shelter and food being the most important.
Without renewable resources for these essential parts of human life, there will always be cause for forest conservation in our world.
There are two distinct perspectives on the issue of forest conservation. On one side, we have people who benefit from cutting trees down. People who work for lumber mills, people looking to open a new hotel in a heavily forested area, etc. Lumber is one of the most important materials because it is used in so many ways in daily life, making it a highly sought after good. Because of this, there will always be reasons for people to be against the conservation of forests. On the other side however, there are the people that are in support of forest conservation. This group is far more worried about the state of our Earth and the effect that forest conservation has on it. They are much more emotionally connected to the Earth and don’t want to see it diminished.