Importance of Forests

Humans and forests

Concrete jungles, factories spewing smoke, crowded roads crammed with traffic - certainly, humankind has come a long way from its humble beginnings. Plants themselves have been around for over 450 million years, starting with simple forms of single - layers of cells. But today they are among the most complex of life systems. And also the oldest and most successful. Imagine - the first plants stood upright about 420 million years before the first animals could!

Evolution of humans

It is widely believed that early human species evolved in and around the African rainforests between four and six million years ago. Even today, our closest relatives, the great apes, live there - one of the most productive, if difficult, ecosystems on the planet.

Recent fossil discoveries, however, pin the figure closer to four billion years, when the first bipedal ancestors of Homo sapiens made the wooded grasslands of East Africa their home. The forest offered them food in the form of plants and animals, and water. After the discovery of fire, wood was used for burning, and later on for making tools. As life evolved, they started clearing land for agriculture and to set up more and more advanced settlements.

An emotional bond?

Human beings and forests have always had a complex relationship. We have depended on forests as long as we have inhabited the planet - getting clean air to breathe, food and water from it, fuel, shade and shelter, and now we need it for economic gain as well.

Early humans were known to worship trees, and even today, in some parts of the world, forests are regarded as places of awe, with spirits attributed to be living there. The worship of forests, plants and animals, and appeasing of animal and tree spirits are still quite common in some cultures, and the forest is treated with the kind of respect reserved for divine objects.

Yet we have been taking continuously from the forest to feed the ever - growing need for wood, and wood and non - wood products, to provide land for the burgeoning population for housing and cultivation.

The forest-people equation

Today, the ecosystem that gave us life is under severe threat. Early humans were hunter - gatherers, and later farmers, and because the population was small, the impact on the environment was minimal.

But in the past couple of thousand years, the growing demands of an ever - increasing human population has halved the Earth's original forest cover. Great Britain was almost completely covered in forest at one time - today, it has a forest cover of around 10%!

Forests are the Earth's largest and most productive ecosystem, and trees their most visible and important constituent. Humankind's past is linked to the forest, and it is easy to see how its survival will map our future as well.