Dear Future President,

One day I wake up and ask my Mother ¨What’s going on in the backyard?” She says, “They are cutting down most of the trees to build a whole new neighborhood.” The Next President, do you know how many trees in square kilometers have been cut down since 1970? According to http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/deforestation_calculations.html,

768,935 square kilometers have been cut down. That's 16.4% of our Amazon Forests. We used to have 4,100,000 square kilometers of the Amazon Forests. We are now down to 3,331,065. That’s only in about 30 years.

According to

http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/5-big-causes-of-deforestation-and-how-you-can-stop-it/2/, 36 football fields worth of forest/trees are burned, hacked down, and destroyed EVERY MINUTE. Some may say that we have to cut down all these trees, but do you ever think of all the animals and plants that live in forests? From the website https://www.pachamama.org/effects-of-deforestation they say that about 80% of our animals and plants live in forests. The more trees we lose, the more greenhouses gasses are released to our atmosphere.

Every day we lose 2.47 million trees. That’s a lot of trees. Yes, we are a huge population.We are in the 21st century. We use technology more than we spend time with our family. The need for paper has risen 400% in the last 40 years. We have computers nowadays, so we should be using the technology that has been developed instead of wasting trees to make so much paper. Don’t get me started with the amount of homes that need to be built every year. According to https://www.reference.com/science/many-trees-cut-down-day-42bf5e6262028f2d ½ a million homes were built in 2014. Lots of people will say that we need to cut down trees, but we actually don’t. I believe we don't need to because there are so many houses available but so many people want to build their dream home. From the website http://www.idahoforests.org/woodhous.htm, they say that “The typical 2,400 square foot home takes about 16,000 board feet of framing and over 14,000 feet of other wood products including plywood, oriented strand board, wood I-joists, hardboard, and particleboard.” When you destroy a forest's you're not just destroying trees, you are also destroying precious animals homes.

This is why I believe that deforestation needs to be taken care of and not put aside like most of our problems in the world. The more we set aside this problem, the sooner we lose our forests and trees. Then we are in big trouble.

Sincerely,

Andrew

Work Cited:

@. “Effects of Deforestation | The Pachamama Alliance.” Effects of Deforestation, https://www.pachamama.org/effects-of-deforestation.

Society, National Geographic. “Deforestation Facts, Deforestation Information, Effects of Deforestation - National Geographic.” National Geographic, http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/deforestation-overview/.

Lam, Paulina. “5 Big Causes of Deforestation and How You Can Stop It.” One Green Planet, One green planet, 2013, http://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/5-big-causes-of-deforestation-and-how-you-can-stop-it/2/.

Butler, Rhett. “Calculating Deforestation in the Amazon.” Deforestation, Mongabay.com, 23 Jan. 2016, http://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/deforestation_calculations.html.

“How Many Trees Are Cut down Each Day?” Reference, https://www.reference.com/science/many-trees-cut-down-day-42bf5e6262028f2d. 

http://www.idahoforests.org/woodhous.htm

http://upstreampolicy.org/issues/paper-forest-destruction/