United States
£ GBP
Language: English
Bad Harvest presents an incisive account of the role that the timber trade has played in the loss and degradation of forests around the world. It examines the environmental consequences of the trade on boreal, temporal and tropical regions, and its impacts for local people working and living in the forests. Following centuries of degradation, most forest ecosystems are severely threatened. Surviving areas of natural or semi-natural habitat are of primary importance in maintaining biodiversity. The Earth currently contains large areas of recently cleared forest, young regenerating forest and middle-age forest. Far less common, particularly in the North but increasingly also in the South, are old-growth forests. These generally have a specialised flora and fauna that can only survive in forests that have been relatively undisturbed for hundreds of years. Increasing global demand for low-cost timber products supports a multi-billion dollar business of illegal and unsustainable logging in forests worldwide. According to some estimates, logging in violation of national laws accounts for 8-10% of global production and trade in forest products. lt also represents 40-50% of all logging in some of the most valuable and threatened forests on earth. The world's forests are disappearing at an alarming rate, and with disastrous consequences. Demand for wood and paper products ranks high amongst the causes of deforestation and forest degradation, and is now the major cause of loss in those forests richest in wildlife.
