In this article, I’ll try to be objective about the positive effects of deforestation and the negative ones. Although I must admit that I am a bit biased, my gut feeling is that at the moment the negative effects outweigh the positive ones.
“What now remains is like the skeleton of a sick man, all the fat and soft earth having wasted away, and only the bare framework of the land being left… Moreover, it was enriched by the yearly rains…”
This could very well be a quotation from a present-day text. It is not. It’s a complaint from the Greek philosopher Plato about the slopes of Athens in Critias which he wrote in 360 BC. Deforestation has been taking place from the time when agriculture became more widely practiced 4,000 years ago.
