Lester R. Brown: Author, Ecologist and Economist

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

PLOWBOY: How are the world's forests holding up under this pressure? Is deforestation becoming a serious problem?

BROWN: Almost every country undergoing rapid population growth is being rapidly deforested. The problem is most severe in Africa, large parts of Asia except for China, parts of Latin America, Central America, and Mexico. I mentioned that 22 years ago I spent part of a year in India. I lived in central India, on the Deccan Plateau ... an area that was-at the time-heavily forested. Well, over the past 20 years I've been back to India perhaps a dozen times, and as I've returned to the area where I used to live, the thing that has impressed me more than anything else has been the massive deforestation that's occurred there. You can go for miles and miles now and never see a tree. The trees are all gone now.

We had a report recently from a Peace Corps volunteer who was working in a village in Ecuador, near Quito. He said that in his village, the closest remaining trees were far up in the mountains. It took about four hours, he said, to climb up to where the trees were, cut the wood, and carry the wood home ... on your back, of course. Today, the people in that village devote a good deal of their energies every day just to getting the wood they need for cooking. It's led to a degradation in their standard of living. Instead of eating two hot meals a day now, these people only eat one. That's all they can afford. ford.

You see, there's no easy way out for these folks. There's no cheap oil ... they can't afford kerosene ... and the wood is too far away. In some African countries, the price of firewood has gone up almost as rapidly as world oil prices over the past few years. In fact, there's a saying now in some African countries that "it costs as much to heat the pot as to fill it".

PLOWBOY: Is deforestation a problem in North America?

BROWN: There are still a few parts of the world where deforestation is not yet a serious problem. North America is one of them. The Soviet Union is another. Western Europe used to be in pretty good shape, although some supply problems are developing there now.

We're not immune to what's happening in other parts of the world, however. The global deforestation problem does affect us. As you know, the price of newsprint has gone up every year now for the past five years. It's doubled, I think, since 1972.

And it'll continue to rise. The implications of this-for education, for the communications media, for literacy in the world?are worth thinking about. It's pretty hard, you know, to have reading materials in Third World countries if there's no cheap newsprint around.

We're feeling the pinch in newsprint, and we're feeling it in lumber costs. In 1960, fully half the families in this country could hope to own their own home, their own single-family dwelling. As of early 1978, that figure is down to less than 32%.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print