If you only have half your forests, you don't need half a brain...

Since the industrial revolution humanity has grown in great numbers + consumed exponentially. From 1 billion, to nearly 7 billion of us. Since that time, we've been consuming resources like mad, so it doesn't take half a brain to work out that this is not sustainable.

Since humanity started settling and building cities 10,000 years ago, we've destroyed half of the planet's original forests, only 20% of what is left is what you could call functional ecosystems, and most shockingly, we've cut down most of that in only the last 35 years!

A football field's worth of forest is destroyed every 2 seconds and this rate is escalating. People wonder if it's humanity's impact on the earth which is changing the climate? Yet we've cut down half of all the forest on the planet? Trees which breathe in carbon, use the sun's radiation to build timber and leaves, and release oxygen. The global biomass (carbon based life) is measured to weigh about 2000 billion tons, 1600 of which is in forests (trees are heavy stores of carbon).

If we've cut the earth's forest's ability to do suck out carbon from the atmosphere in half, whilst destroying half of the forest which we can calculate weighed about 1600 billion tons, a large chunk of that ending up as CO2, whilst burning 86 million barrels of oil, every single day, and 6700 million tons of coal every single year, year in year out......

The atmosphere tends to change in composition when you do this.

It's really very simple. Remove half the trees on a planet with a perfectly balanced ecological system, which used to produce oxygen and store carbon in very particular quantities, and you get imbalance and environmental instability.

It should be pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that we're destroying the planet, it's ability to support the human race and that we need to stop this ASAP.

No only does the land deforested tip the earth's ecological balance out, it has flow on effects such as widespread desertification. By 2050, studies such as Kendall and Pimentel (1994) show empirical evidence that there will simply not be enough food for 10 billion people by 2050, which means billions will most likely die. The capacity for existing arable land to increase food production capacity will peak, whilst the amount of fertile land area is actually rapidly decreasing due to increasing water scarcity and increasing desertification. These problems are caused by deforestation/land clearing, over graising and chemically treated land, beaten up by industrial agricultural processes for decades until the soil microbiology and surrounding ecosystems simply die.

Environmental issues are humanitarian issues.

The Amazon Basin. Images like this are now synonymous with the Amazon, as humanity continues to deforest this land and ensure a global collapse of the earth's ecological systems which support the existence of humans and other species. We're really not a very clever species, what we're doing to the global environment is suicidal.