Finding BALANCE: Our future, Our forests

Forests are an integral part of our lives and our future. They are essential not only for storing carbon and thus maintaining the atmosphere, but they also sustain an extraordinary amount of biodiversity. This great breadth of life is responsible for close to half of all our medicines. In short, we need healthy forests in order to survive.

But preservation has long been considered an environmental issue. Beginning in the 1970’s, even those who saw forests within a larger context still separated environmental issues from social and economic ones.

Today, this silo approach is no longer applicable; it simply no longer works.

Both individuals and policymakers must understand not only the many complex ways that urban and rural populations depend on each other, but also the link between the ever increasing need for agriculture and its relationship to the food we put on our tables.

As one expert says, it’s difficult to find an area that is not linked to forests. “It’s important to see all these elements together. The economic risk, the social risk, the environmental risk, and act now that we can still act.”