the.com/deforestation
Earth's haircut, except the hair never grows back and the planet can't breathe without it
means The clearing or destruction of forests, usually to make way for farming, grazing, logging, or development.
from Built from the Latin-rooted 'forest' (from medieval Latin 'forestis,' land set apart, likely tied to 'foris' meaning 'outside' — outside the walls of a hunting preserve) plus the prefix 'de-,' meaning removal or undoing. Stitched together as a formal English word in the 19th century, when colonial administrators and foresters needed a clinical term for the large-scale clearing of land — a bureaucratic word for an act that was anything but small.
- rate
- a forest the size of a football pitch vanishes every few seconds
- top driver
- beef and soy farming, not firewood, drive most of it
- carbon math
- cutting trees releases stored carbon they spent centuries banking
- irony
- rainforest soil is often too poor to farm once cleared