Habitat loss  Agriculture  Pollution  Development  Transportation  War

Forests which are being cut down all around the world, are of two different kinds.

The first is the temperate forests, which are located further north and are usually coniferous (pine). Loggers in these areas threaten the best remaining habitat of the Wolf and Grizzly bear. Not only this, but many temperate forests are cut down in ways that do not protect the land. The result is that soil and nutrients are washed away, polluting streams and reducing the regenerative capacity of the forest.

The second is the tropical forests and it is the fate of these forests that will largely determine the biological wealth of earth in the future. These ecosystems are the single greatest reservoir of biotic diversity on the planet. About two-thirds of all species in the tropics occur in the rainforests. About two-fifths to one-half of all species on earth occur in the rainforests, which cover only 6% of the earth's land surface. And these species remain mostly uncatalogued: only about 15% have even been named, and little is known about their biology.

The loss of the forests have been estimated at 25 acres per minute between 1975 and the year 2000. This comes to about thirteen million acres of forest lost per year. The large numbers of populations and species, will disappear even more rapidly than the forests themselves.

The pressures responsible for rainforest loss come primarily from farming, logging, ranching, and cutting for firewood. In the rainforests, when one tree is felled, it drags down many of its neighbours with it. Furthermore, large areas of the forests are damaged by the dragging of logs, the building of roads to haul timber away, and the creation of depots for stockpiling them. And finally, ranching is a great cause of deforestation, because large tracts of land are being converted to rangeland for the grazing of cattle.