The Journal

Rebuilding Earth’s Forests: America’s Old Growth Forests

Rebuilding Earth’s Forests: America’s Old Growth Forests

Enjoy Our Forests Responsibly

Sometimes, we take our trees for granted. Living in Northwestern Georgia, we got to enjoy growing up in the woods, building mini treehouses, and collecting pine cones to throw at each other. (So stupid, we know! But hey, it was a childhood we laugh back on now)

While deforestation is a huge issue on the global level, it’s a smaller one here in the states, especially because we have laws that prohibit the abuse of the land. We do need some better ones to make sure there aren’t any loopholes. We also understand that many communities and local economies depend on logging, so we also need to help provide other sustainable ways people can continue to make a living. We can’t just expect people not to eat. This has always been a common misconception. Luckily we have had people care about our forests and environment before me and you were probably thought to ensure generations like ours could enjoy them. We now have not only a moral obligation to do this same, but here at DiscoverHorizons, a spiritual one as well that aligns with the stewardship and tending of the “Garden”. The main push today for protecting America’s forest is reducing the abuse of logging in critical areas such as protecting old-growth forests. These majestic and beautiful forests that have been on this land for thousands of years.

An old-growth forest — also termed primary forest or late seral forest — is a forest that has attained great age without significant disturbance and thereby exhibits unique ecological features. These incredible forests tend to have enormous trees of great heights. Depending on the forest, this may take from a century to several millennia to get to this level of growth.

In 2006, Greenpeace identified that the world’s remaining intact forest landscapes are distributed among the continents as follows:

  • 35% in Latin America: The Amazon rainforest is mainly located in Brazil, which clears a larger area of forest annually than any other country in the world.
  • 28% in North America, which harvests 10,000 km2 of ancient forests every year. Many of the fragmented forests of southern Canada and the United States lack adequate animal travel corridors and functioning ecosystems for large mammals. Most of the remaining old-growth forests in the contiguous United States and Alaska are on public land.
  • 19% in northern Asia, home to the largest boreal forest in the world
  • 8% in Africa, which has lost most of its intact forest landscapes in the last 30 years. The timber industry and local governments are responsible for destroying huge areas of intact forest landscapes and continue to be the single largest threat to these areas.
  • 7% in South Asia Pacific, where the Paradise Forests are being destroyed faster than any other forest on Earth. Much of the large, intact forest landscapes have already been cut down, 72% in Indonesia, and 60% in Papua New Guinea.
  • Less than 3% in Europe, where more than 150 km2 of intact forest landscapes are cleared every year and the vast areas of the region’s intact forest landscapes in European Russia are shrinking rapidly. In the United Kingdom, they are known as ancient woodlands.

We’ve compiled some of the most amazing photos of America’s old-growth forest ecosystems. Much of it lies in the Pacific Northwest sharing it with the British Columbia province of Canada. The first time we went to the Olympia National Park, it was almost a spiritual experience. As firm believers in God’s hidden glory in creation, we saw his fingerprint in all the beauty we encountered. The high precipitation means everything is constantly wet due to the rain and fog, giving the soil just what it needs to continue growing the ferns and moss along the surface of the forests. We highly highly recommend visiting this part of the world, wherever you are from. It’s a testament to the revelation in creation.

These photos may be beautiful, but they do absolutely no justice to actually being there in person. We definitely recommend visiting this place is you’re in the area! At DiscoverHorizons, we can deeply about our forests. They save people as well, not just the environment. We need to ensure we do everything we can to make sure future generations can enjoy God’s creation for years to come. Did you know that you have the option to make an impact when you purchase a product from us? You have the option of planting a tree if that’s your preferred impact. This is our tiny pebble in building a foundation to help rebuild Earth’s forests.

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