Trees are icons of nature and significant carbon sinks, so anyone interested in climate change is invested in the fate of forests.

In recent weeks, Hannah Ritchie of Our World in Data has written several articles on deforestation. She had occasion to write on the subject because the quinquennial United Nations report Global Forest Resource Assessment (GFRA) was just released. It was filled with data and nuanced analysis on the State of the World’s Forests (another UN forestry report).

In one of Ritchie’s articles, she shows that the rate of deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Since then, the rate at which humans burn, chop, cut, and replace forests with farms and cities has fallen. And it’s not just modern industrial humans who used the natural world to excess – half of all forest loss took place before the year 1900. That point also illustrates how stunningly fast we shed trees in the 20^th century. Roughly speaking, what took us ten thousand years to do before 1900, we managed to repeat in a mere hundred years. Deforestation, she notes, “is not a new problem.”

But it’s also not as bad as we think. The very same chart that illustrates the stunning extent of forest loss during settled human civilization also indicates that, relatively speaking, we have barely lost any forest coverage in the last twenty years.

Between 1990 and today, the Earth lost 177.5 million hectares of forests, an area about the size of Alaska. That’s a big area, but considering how large the Earth is and how mindbogglingly vast some of its forests are, it’s not that much (the GFRA estimates that the Earth’s total area classified as forests amounts to 4,060 million hectares or a bit below one-third of all habitable land).

More importantly, the rate of forest loss is tumbling: the decline in the 2010s was 40 percent below that of the 1990s. Plenty of us who are optimistic about nature and the state of human flourishing have predicted that the global deforestation rate will soon hit zero. In this GFRA report, we were almost right.

In the past decade, the yearly reduction in forest area was 0.12 percent – down from 0.19 percent in the 1990s and 0.35 percent in the 1980s. In other words, out of 100 hectares of forested area in 2010, 98.85 hectares still green the world today. Emphatically, we are not running out of forests.

What’s a bit worrying is that the deforestation rate itself has recently been dropping more slowly. Fortunately, the authors of the GFRA write that this slowdown is “due to a reduction in the rate of forest expansion,” not because humanity is ravenously clear-cutting the world’s forests. Indeed, we seem to have cut down fewer trees than in previous decades but have failed to replant (or let regrow) as many as we had before.

The silver lining to that observation is that regrowth and replanting is something that policymakers in the West and those of us who treasure the world’s forests can actually control, whereas persuading political leaders or poverty-stricken families of the Global South not to use the natural resources around them is a much more challenging and ethically dubious task.

Furthermore, while forest areas have declined, the remaining areas’ biomass has not. On the contrary, the biomass per unit of area increased by about 4 percent from 1990 to 2020, almost entirely offsetting the reduction in forest area (-4.2 percent) over that same period. Put differently, while the global forested area is smaller, forests have become greener and denser, nearly balancing out the total amount of biomass. This vegetation boom happened because, as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere increases, the growth of everything green accelerates – which makes sense since CO₂ is plant food.

The stock of sequestered carbon in roots, soil, branches, and trunks is today level with what it was in 2010, and only 1 percent less than what it was in 1990 – an annual rate of decline of 0.03 percent. While the world’s forests are not without their (largely local) problems, the amount of green in the world is tantalizingly close to stabilization. All of us, from climate alarmists to optimists, should cherish that.

Even more extraordinary is the decline of deforestation across South America. In the 2010s, the deforested area was half that of the previous decade (2.6 million hectares vs. 5.2 million hectares in the 2000s). Despite all the doom and gloom about Brazil’s relatively modest increase in deforestation under President Jair Bolsonaro, the more than 700 contributors to the GFRA report conclude that “the deforestation hotspot is now in Africa.”

While Brazil was the single-largest deforester in the 2010s (15 million hectares), its reduction in total forest area is not far above the Democratic Republic of Congo (11 million hectares). Combining the DRC’s deforestation with that of Angola (6 million hectares) and Tanzania (4 million hectares) shows that Africa’s deforestation is more worrying than Brazil’s Amazonian blunders.

I and many others investigating the Environmental Kuznets Curve (an inverted-U shape relationship between income per capita and environmental impacts like deforestation) have argued that we shouldn’t focus too much on Brazilian deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere. As long as Brazilians get richer, their impact on Brazil’s pristine forests will gradually lessen.

Many critics have said that Brazil invalidates the EKC theory, citing the rapid increase in deforestation in the Amazon. Despite being much richer in terms of GDP per-capita than other top deforesters (Angola, Tanzania, DRC, Mozambique, Bolivia, Indonesia), Brazil nearly doubled its deforested area in recent years– from 457,000 hectares in 2012 to 1,012,900 hectares in 2019.

What that criticism overlooks is that Brazil is a deeply unequal country, regionally and economically. Its rich southern states have income levels on par with many European countries, whereas the North and Northwest – where most of the forests are – are closer to income levels in sub-Saharan Africa. Indeed, Pará, one of Brazil’s poorest states and equal to Namibia or Indonesia in per-capita income, is almost entirely responsible for Brazil’s increased deforestation rate in the last few years.

The shift of the last decade – from South America as the primary source of deforestation to Africa – has been overlooked, as has the decade-by-decade decline in deforestation rates. Despite the much-publicized news about fires in the Amazon, most deforestation now takes place in Africa. This isn’t surprising, as Africa is the poorest continent, and we know that poverty often means living off the land and cutting down forests for fuel. Similarly, the latest UN reports show us that deforestation is a poverty story, not a story about bad regional politics or market failures.

In contrast to the many negative stories about rainforests, the latest deforestation numbers are a reason to rejoice. And here’s my prediction: the next time the GFRA publishes aggregate data, we will see still lower deforestation rates, perhaps even zero. Gradually, but steadily, the Environmental Kuznets Curve is playing out, and the planet is slowly becoming greener.

For many generations, most Americans, and most others, have expected that humanity will use more and more of precious Nature, that rising use will cause scarcity and higher prices, and that higher prices will help protect what remains. Consistent with this view, the field of Ecosystem Services has emerged, and attempts to assign astronomical prices to them. Deluxe prices must show that much Nature is more valuable unused than used.

What if we turn this entire argument on its head? What if the future entails not more use of precious resources but flat or falling use? Not because they cost so much, or even because of taboos, but because the resources are not needed. Their price might fall to zero, as has the price of most of the timber in the state of Maine. Such drops could also lead to massive conservation, indeed restoration, of Nature, not only because protectors can acquire Nature cheaply, but because Nature is useless, or nearly so, at least in a traditional market sense.

Suppose households and businesses keep lifting their efficiency, and rebound or revenge offsets only a little of the gain, so that demand stagnates. Suppose we dematerialize, and suppose the materials we use are not scarce but the most common elements in the crust such as magnesium, aluminum, and notably silicon.  Silicon makes not just chips but stone and glass. I personally love glass bricks.

And instead of weaving ourselves ever more tightly into the biosphere, suppose we decouple not only from energy and materials but from the biosphere itself.

Human ancestors, such as Australopithecus, were completely immersed in the biological system of the savannah and forests, and depended on the negentropic flux of solar light, captured by chlorophyll. Subsequent agricultural humans came to control some of the biological system, to augment productivity and consequently number. Technological and scientific humans could largely cut ties with the biosphere and construct an internal world.

In fact, one can frankly ask whether resources and environment matter anymore, even the climate about which so many now demonstrate and negotiate. As I have written previously:

High incomes, great longevity, and large population concentrations have been achieved in every class of environment on Earth. We manufacture computers in hot, dry Phoenix and cool, wet Portland. We perform heart surgery in humid Houston and snowy Cleveland. Year round we grow flowers in the Netherlands and vegetables in Belgium. The metro in Budapest runs regardless of the mud that slowed Hungarians for a thousand years. In Berlin and Bangkok we work in climate-controlled office buildings. We have insulated travel, communications, energy generation, food availability, and almost all major social functions from all but the most extreme environmental conditions of temperature and wind, light and dark, moisture, tides, and seasons.

Humanity’s goal is to render ourselves independent from the natural system. For all the poetry about Nature, we have basically retreated into walled cities, autarchic except for the input of energy or negentropy. Most of this no longer arrives by chlorophyll. Indeed, some is now furnished by uranium, and most, indeed nearly all, could be, as we get better at manufacturing hydrogen to carry energy around. The profound importance of nuclear power, as Einstein and other atomic scientists realized, is its facility to decouple us from the biosphere.

In practice, the natural trend toward the megalopolis is creating zones of great density, leaving the possibility of creating very low density patches or “sanctuaries” where people might go when they wish or simply observe through millions of mini-cameras placed here and there, including on other animals. The built environment could grow from 5-6% of the land surface today to, say, 10%. Meanwhile, we will continue the shift, toward landless and vertical agriculture.  Eventually, the microbes will do the work of most food production. We can never decouple from the microbes. I hope they know how to form political action committees.

Cities will function essentially as closed systems where most materials, including water, will be recycled. The only physical input need be free energy and the only output heat, or negentropy.

From the point of view of the materials balance, the main factor that must be accounted is the dowry, that is, the materials locked into the system and the losses in the recycling process. My mentor Cesare Marchetti estimated a generous and manageable dowry of 100 tons of materials/person, of which 30 tons are “high energy” materials such as metals and organics and 70 tons are “low-energy” materials such as concrete. We will never dematerialize completely but we can stop grinding up new crust.

A highly efficient hydrogen economy, landless agriculture, industrial ecosystems in which waste virtually disappears during this silicon century — these can enable large, prosperous human populations to co-exist with the whales and the lions and the eagles and all that underlie them.  The primeval forest can tranquilly regrow for the amusement of naturalists. Ponder the walled city as the prototype of the spaceships we may eventually send to other parts of the universe.

The 1952 Paley Commission Report that started the think-tank Resources for the Future famously and correctly wrote, “The growth of demand is at the core of the materials problem we face.” We may still worry for a few decades about exhausting primary resources and overloading the environment, as we pass peak child and peak use of just about everything except information. We will keep doubling our use of information every ten years, and that will liberate the rest. And within another 60 years we may smile, because our actual achievement will have been to achieve conservation by establishing an enduring trajectory of making Nature useless. 

This first appeared in RealClearScience.