From a suburbanite's-eye view, American forests are fast disappearing, as families migrate from center cities and new housing subdivisions and roads force the felling of innumerable stands of stately trees.
         But what the suburbanite doesn't see is that, in the vast stretches of American and Canadian wilderness lands, a quite different process is unfolding: Far more trees are being planted than harvested, a trend that has been going on for decades.
         The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's State of the World's Forests 2001 report says that the area in North America covered by woods grew by nearly 10 million acres over the last 10 years alone. The volume of timber in U.S. forests is some 25 percent greater today than it was four decades ago.
         America has roughly the same forested area in 2002 as it did 80 years ago. Just two examples of the resurgence:

Vermont's woods have expanded from 37 percent of the land in 1850 to cover 77 percent today.

The forests in New Hampshire covered 50 percent of the state in 1850 and cover 87 percent today.
         Every year, private firms and government agencies plant some 1.5 billion tree seedlings in the United States. This amounts to about 2.4 million acres per year. Since the 1940s, annual growth of new trees has always exceeded the number cut down. By 1992, tree growth outstripped harvest by 34 percent and the volume of wood in the forest was 360 percent more than in 1920.
         In Canada, it is mandated by law that for every tree that is cut at least one be planted. Thus, an annual average of 650 million tree seedlings are started in areas where forests have been harvested.
         Looking at the entire land area of the United States, 33 percent is covered with trees. This compares with 46 percent in the colonial period. (By contrast, Canada, with its far smaller population, still has about 90 percent of its original forest cover.) Between 1600 and 1920, many U.S. woodlands were sawed down to make way for agriculture and homes. Most of this razing--the vast majority of which was undertaken to make way for farmland, not cities--took place between 1850 and 1910.
         One reason America has the same area of forestland today as in 1920--despite a 143 percent rise in population--is that, in 1910, about 25 percent of the cropland was devoted to producing feed for horses. As the automobile and farm machinery replaced equines, all that land was freed up for human-food crops. Another reason for the lack of pressure on wooded lands is the huge strides in technology, chemistry, and genetics that have vastly increased farm productivity, allowing far more food to be grown per acre than was ever dreamed possible.

For more information, go to www.forestinformation.com.

--The Editor