Abstract
Deforestation has become a familiar term in the latter half of the 1980s, and many people react as if it were a new discovery. In fact it has been a problem since the origin of agriculture when man began to clear the forests to plant crops. This in turn enabled him to enlarge the population size and therefore, the tendency to deforest has continued and increased. Rather than turn straight to the forests of Brazil or Malaysia, we need to begin nearer to home and realize that when the Romans reached Britain it was largely a forested island, and that the scenery which we think of as rural today with its farmland, hedges and downs, is artificial. Hannibal did not have to travel to Central or Southern Africa to obtain elephants for his famous attempt to cross the Alps because these animals roamed the forested areas of North Africa just across the Mediterranean Sea from Italy. Israel is a semi-desert country because it was deforested in Biblical times. The result of forest loss in the Middle East and North Africa is obvious, the increase of desert.
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Notes
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© 1990 Ghillean T. Prance
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Prance, G.T. (1990). Deforestation: a Botanist’s View. In: Angell, D.J.R., Comer, J.D., Wilkinson, M.L.N. (eds) Sustaining Earth. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21091-6_5
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