What are the specific effects that typical logging practices have on biodiversity?
Unsustainable approaches to forestry destroy the delicate network of relationships between trees and other living organisms – plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria – in a particular habitat. The interplay of all of these elements is necessary to maintain a well-functioning ecosystem – that is, one which provides an adequate food supply and the conditions that allow its populations to reproduce successfully. Even something seemingly minor, like the construction of roads in previously roadless areas, can have damaging effects. Roads break up the continuity of forest habitats in ways that affect animals’ access to food and shelter, introduce areas of bright light incompatible with the native vegetation, and bring in outsider settlers, who may not have the knowledge to live sustainably in the forest environment. How do forests store carbon dioxide, and how much of it do they keep out of the atmosphere? Carbon dioxide is taken in through leaves as part of photosynthesis, the process which pr
