AustLit

A recent census of Earth's biomass (the total mass of organisms in a given area) indicates that plants, which constitute approximately 80 percent of all biomass, have been reduced by half since the beginning of human civilisation (Bar-On, Phillips and Milo). To put this in plain terms, as geobiologist Hope Jahren does in her engaging memoir Lab Girl: A Story of Trees, Science and Love, ‘since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new [tree] stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less than six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump’ (n.p.). If one compares six hundred years to 470 million years (the time which plants have been on earth), one gains a sense of the rapid pace of deforestation: it will be 120 generations (if a generation is measured as twenty-five years), as opposed to nearly nineteen million generations.' (Introduction)