Notes on Progress: Growing Forests

Notes on Progress are pieces that are a bit too short to run on Works in Progress. You can opt out of Notes here. Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last ice age, forests covered 57% of Earth’s habitable land area. Trees spanned an area of over 60 million km2, which is three times the size of modern-day Russia. They ranged from the snowy conifers of the northern latitudes to the warm jungles around the equator. Since then, humans have come to dominate how the earth’s land is used. Forests have suffered: by 1900, forest cover had shrunk to about 48% of habitable land. Today it’s fallen to about 38%, or 40 million km2. That means, over the broad sweep of human history, we’ve cut down about one-third of earth’s forests. Moreover, about half of this deforestation has occurred since 1900, during the era of global industrialization. Forests absorb a substantial fraction of the carbon dioxide humans emit each year. And they host most of the world’s roughly 8 million species. Protecting

Notes on Progress are pieces that are a bit too short to run on Works in Progress. You can opt out of Notes here. Ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last ice age, forests covered 57% of Earth’s habitable land area. Trees spanned an area of over 60 million km2, which is three times the size of modern-day Russia. They ranged from the snowy conifers of the northern latitudes to the warm jungles around the equator. Since then, humans have come to dominate how the earth’s land is used. Forests have suffered: by 1900, forest cover had shrunk to about 48% of habitable land. Today it’s fallen t