Why do you think forests are important?

Every continent except Antarctica has forests. Which are rich habitat for plants and animals. Forests serve as a lung for the world and a bed of nutrients for new life to prosper.

They provide us innumerable products and in an urge to extract them we indiscriminately destroy them. People clear forests to use the wood, or to make way for farming or development. Each year, the Earth loses about 36 million acres of forest to deforestation.

Deforestation destroys wildlife habitats and increases soil erosion. It also releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming. Deforestation accounts for 15 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Deforestation also harms the people who rely on forests for their survival, hunting and gathering, harvesting forest products, or using the timber for firewood.

Sustainable forestry practices are critical for ensuring resources well into the future. Perhaps the bishnoi’s of Rajasthan could tell us how. As we recall brave Amrita Devi and her daughters, followed by villagers who clung to trees in the forest surrounding their village and laid down their lives to save them, we are faced with a realization about how great a movement towards conservation can be. They were protesting against the Kings’ order to collect wood for the construction of his palace and defending the pledge of peaceful coexistence taken by them as a bishnoi. It is a set of 29 rules to conserve natures’ resources that every bishnoi vows to protect.

As you have already studied about the Chenchu and Gondu tribes of our state and are aware of how carefully they extract resources from nature and help revive it. (refer lesson of VII class - Forest our life) Some sustainable forestry methods include using low-impact logging practices, harvesting with natural regeneration in mind, and avoiding certain logging techniques, such as removing all the high-value trees or all the largest trees from a forest. Trees can also be conserved if consumers recycle. People in China and Mexico, for example, reuse much of their wastepaper, including writing paper, wrapping paper, and cardboard. If half the world’s paper were recycled, much of the worldwide demand for new paper would be fulfilled, saving many of the Earth’s trees. We can also replace some wood products with alternatives like bamboo, which is actually a type of grass, that grows SCERT very fast.