Deforestation

From the perspective of global studies, complex human-driven processes of environmental transformation like deforestation are seen in the light of their relationship with concurrent historical processes of global economic, cultural, and social change. Thus, the meaning that forests have to people all over the world today is seen as continually changing in association with 500 years of modernization. The most profound social and environmental effects of modernization are linked to the ongoing expansion of the world economic [Page 361]system, which itself is viewed through the lenses of various theoretical perspectives considered useful in understanding that process (classical, neoclassical, neoliberal, liberal, social-democratic, Marxist, feminist, green, etc.). In the current phase of this expansion—globalization—deforestation, defined as the loss of original “frontier forest” cover, emerges as a significant social problem, the dominant human causes of which include agricultural conversion, pollution (acid rain), fire, disease, pestilence, and commodification by both private and state actors, resulting in extinctions, release of carbon into the atmosphere, damage to fresh water supplies, and more.

Forest conversion for subsistence agriculture accounts for the largest source of human-caused deforestation. To understand subsistence agriculture, it is necessary to examine how the world economic system produces and maintains mass populations dependent on informal economies and subsistence lifestyles. Given that the world is significantly divided between richer, more economically developed northern countries and poorer, still developing southern countries, global analysis must take into consideration the fact that North American and Euro-Asian countries largely deforested their homelands in the process of achieving their own industrial development and now depend on forest product exports from the developing countries, thus linking the historico-political-economic pattern of colonization, imperialism, and dependency to the problem of deforestation.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon forest of South America is a case in point. Colonized by Portugal, underdeveloped in the 20th century, and, until recently, dependent on northern economies, large tracts of Brazil's interior tropical forests remain intact. If tropical forest cover loss is higher on an acre-by-acre basis in Brazil than anywhere else during the first decades of the 21st century, that is because it is still 60% to 80% intact, whereas, by comparison, the original redwood forest ecosystem of the western United States was 96% cut by 1985 (3% having been preserved in parks by that time and 1% remaining in private hands, vulnerable to further deforestation), and in the eastern and midwestern United States, the original temperate deciduous and temperate coniferous forests have been nearly 100% removed (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2011; Malhi et al., 2008, p. 169; Noss, 2000, p. 39). Extending this analysis around the Northern Hemisphere, if one hears little about deforestation in Europe, the Caucasus, Greece, Turkey, or the Middle East, that is because human civilization deforested these regions entirely in the centuries and indeed millennia leading up to and including the last 500 years of Western modernity.

Russia and Canada represent two unique regions within the global North that bear special consideration. Their northern boreal forests, although heavily exploited, still have significant amounts of original frontier forests. The reasons for this are complex, but they include the facts that vast acreages of evergreen and coniferous forest in these regions have been out of reach, first to traditional forestry methods and then to the early forms of mechanized logging. But now, with the spread of roadways and increasingly powerful chainsaws, tractors, railways, and helicopters, even the most remote of these forests are increasingly vulnerable to exploitation. However, logging is only one of the sources of forest cover loss associated with globalization in these regions; at least equally threatening is the spread of disease and invasive pests, much of which can be associated with global warming, which is progressively making more and more of these northern forests vulnerable to organisms previously limited by colder temperatures.

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