Only twenty percent of the world's wild forests remain!
Based on a Rueters News Story. March 1997
The World Resources Institute has released a shocking study that shows that only 20 percent of the world's major wild ("frontier") forests remain intact. Using satellite imagery to gauge past and present forest cover the study concludes that 8,000 years of logging and clearing have eliminated frontier forests from most of the nations where they once existed. Frontier forests have been wiped out in North Africa, the Middle East, and are nearly gone in Europe. The `lower 48' United States has only about one percent of its frontier forests left. In the temperate region of the planet (British Columbia is in this zone) only three percent of the frontier forest still remains. The valleys of the Stoltmann Wilderness are carpeted in frontier temperate rainforest.
1996 clearcut in the Elaho Valley near the Stoltmann Wilderness. This forest took many centuries to grow, but only a few days for an InterFor logging crew to destroy. Photo: John Clarke
