Brazil to open up 860,000 acres of protected Amazon rainforest to logging, mining and farming

[snooper2]

20. We actually are pretty good at taking care of our forests

In 1630, the estimated area of U.S. forest land was
1,023 million acres or about 46 percent of the total
land area. Since 1630, about 256 million acres of forest
land have been converted to other uses—mainly
agricultural. Nearly two-thirds of the net conversion
to other uses occurred in the second half of the 19th
century, when an average of 13 square miles (mi2
) of
forest was cleared every day for 50 years. By 1910,
the area of forest land had declined to an estimated
754 million acres, or 34 percent of the total land area.
In 2012, forest land comprised 766 million acres, or
33 percent of the total land area of the United States.
Forest area has been relatively stable since 1910, although
the population has more than tripled since then.


https://www.fia.fs.fed.us/library/brochures/docs/2012/ForestFacts_1952-2012_English.pdf