Doyle Rice writes in USA Today about U.S. losing trees faster than other heavily forested nations:

Out of seven of the most heavily forested nations on Earth, the United States experienced a greater percentage of forest loss from 2000 to 2005 than did any of the other countries, a study said Monday.

But what part of the U.S.?

The one part of the contiguous USA that experienced the most forest loss was the Southeast, a large chunk of which lost more than 10% of its forest cover from 2000 to 2005, the year for which the most recent data were available.

Compared to what?

Worldwide, researchers determined that the globe lost forest cover of nearly 400,000 square miles — roughly 3% of the world’s forested areas — during the first half of the last decade. The other countries in the study were Canada, Russia, China, Brazil, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

That’s right: the U.S. lost more trees percentagewise than the Congo in Central Africa; more than the Amazon in Brazil, and the U.S. southeast lost the most.

And why?

“We do not quantify what the causes are, and we do not quantify how much forest gain there was from 2000 to 2005,” [Matthew] Hansen [of South Dakota State University] says. “But clearly, industrial harvesting/clearing is very important.”

Man-made causes of forest loss include logging and wildfires caused by people. Natural causes would include natural wildfires and storm damage.

Not to mention the most obvious: clearing for development.

Do we want to add to that clearcutting for dubious biomass plants?

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