Unchopping a Tree

Watch this:

Maya Lin - Unchopping a Tree from What is Missing? Foundation on Vimeo.

I saw this video in a post at Treehugger.com, where they’ve gathered some interesting facts about deforestation. Currently 90 acres of rainforest worldwide are being destroyed every minute. That’s an amazingly fast rate. The video shows how quickly some famous parks around the world could be deforested.

I wanted to try it with an example of a place I’ve seen for myself. You might be familiar with Kings Park in Perth. It’s 1000 acres of bushland and botannical gardens full of native and endangered species, with minimal roadways, a little bit of parkland, and a beautiful view, just out of the city centre.

I love it, and I think it’s one of Perth’s loveliest places to have a picnic, take a walk, or just relax. If someone decided it wasn’t worth protecting, it’d only take 11 minutes to leave it completely bare, no plants, no animals left. That’s just how easy it is to destroy such a valuable eco-system.

What parks or protected forests are there near you? At a rate of 90 acres a minute, how long would it take for them to disappear? Now think about how that’s happening in the Amazon, across South-East Asia, and in other places around the world.

As a society, we seriously need to cut back on the amount of paper products we use. And we need to do more to protect the world’s forests.