People Vs. The Planet

The age-old argument that the economic benef its of deforestation overrule our environmental impact no longer holds weight

- Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal And Nicholas De Pencier

FORESTS ARE indispensable to life on this planet. Nearly 1.6 billion people rely on them as sources of food, income, or shelter. Humans have altered over 75 percent of icefree land on the planet with agriculture, mining, urbanization, and industrialization. And around half of the world’s original forests have been cleared, fragmented, or degraded for human use. These are hard statistics to conceptualize, especially in Canada, where forest spans coast to coast. The boreal, which is the primarily coniferous stretch of dense forest that spans the northern hemisphere above the fiftieth parallel, is a complex landscape of vibrant biodiversity supporting not only the lives of flora and fauna but humans as well.

In total, Canada has 347 million hectares of forest, some of which has the capacity to absorb approximately six tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. In a 2017 study, the Nature Conservancy of Canada and TD Bank Group concluded that the cost to society of losing the ecological services forests provide would be between $5,800 and $46,000 per hectare per year.