1 People who use wood for construction and fuel cut down trees without much
thought. How does this affect forests?
Answers
Answer:
There well be less rainfall.....
hope it helpful......
Answer:
here’s many, many reasons why you would want to cut down trees, but we can divide them into these categories:
Wood and paper products
Fuel
Clearing Land
Wood and paper products should be obvious. I live in a house made of wood, with wooden furniture and books made of paper. By far, wood is the cheapest construction material there is - this is why its still being used despite the fact that we have concrete and iron available to use. And still, wooden houses can last a hundred years or more - I doubt we’ll see wood phased out during our lifetimes.
Paper products are a little more subtle. While wood is manufactured at sawmills, wood pulp is manufactured at pulp mills. Pulp mills are smelly, messy, dirty, dangerous, and expensive. The reason we still use pulp mills is because paper products are incredibly useful - even though we’re shifting toward digital instead of print, paper products extend far beyond just books and documents.
Fuel isn’t quite as popular as it used to be. Many people still heat their houses with woodstoves - myself included. In places where the winter is long and cold, it is far more economical to burn wood than to use electricity. This is much more common in the Third World. In many places where wood is used as a heat source, its rare to see large, healthy forests. And, looking at pictures of early Canadian settlements, you’ll often see the towns completely stripped of trees - all the easy to get fuel went first.
Clearing Land is far more destructive than either products or fuel. You would want to clear land to develop farms, towns, and cities. Often times when land is cleared, much of the wood is just burned in slash piles rather than used, especially when the trees being cleared aren’t economical to sell.
Unfortunately, all of these are here to stay. We can’t just stop any of these from happening because its not economically viable. However, we can use some techniques to lessen the impact on the forest as a whole:
Selective logging practices. Rather than clear-cutting a forest for lumber, we can high-grade and select better wood while leaving much of the forest intact. This is more expensive than clear-cutting, however.
Offer alternative fuel sources. Imagine if recycling companies compressed paper products into chunks to be burned instead of trees. This wouldn’t keep up with demand 100% and wouldn’t help third worlders, though.
Government protection and parklands. Trees in parks usually can’t be harvested, and in Canada we have huge swaths of protected land - However the forests around them are still a patchwork of logging operations
Explanation: