Question: If we continue to cut down trees at the rate that we currently are, in what year?in how many years will we have cut down every tree on the planet?

Susan Cartwright answered on 18 Jun 2015:

The answer to this is very sensitive to what kind of tree you mean.

We are not losing coniferous trees. We do log them, but we plant them as well. They are, by tree standards, quite short-lived, and can be farmed effectively (i.e. you can cut a stand down, replant, and come back in 30 years or so and log again).

We are losing hardwoods, especially tropical hardwoods (rainforest). I’m not an expert, but from what I’ve read, at the current rate of logging the Amazon rainforest would be gone in something like 50 years. I don’t think the African rainforest is going that fast, but we might still be talking about timescales of the order of a century or so. Some places, like Madagascar, have lost almost all their rainforest within living memory.

Britain used to be almost entirely forested, with hardwoods (oak, ash etc.) in England and mixed hardwoods (birch, rowan) and coniferous (Scots pine) in highland Scotland and probably also the Welsh mountains. We lost nearly all of it from the invention of farming to the Middle Ages, through a combination of logging for construction and firewood and clearance for agriculture. We are now adding rather than losing trees, but in some places the environmental degradation would make it hard to get the forests back (it’s hard to grow trees on a peat bog).

Rainforests are areas of extremely high species diversity, and logging them is not a good long-term strategy (most of the ecosystem’s nutrients are stored in the trees – cleared rainforest is very poor-quality soil and quickly degrades). Ideally, we need to stop doing this. But many of the countries in which rainforest is being lost are poor countries which rely on timber sales to boost their economies, and it’s hard for developed countries – which did exactly the same thing earlier in their histories – to be very convincing in making moral judgments. Eco-tourism may help. Empowering the forest natives would help more, but isn’t happening: Amazonian natives don’t want to lose their forest, but have little power against the logging and mining corporations.

It can be done: Japan, back in history (can’t remember exactly when) realised that losing all its forest would be Not A Good Idea, and took steps to conserve it. Much of the interior of Japan is still forested.