I'm a tree hugger. I've had this image rolling around in my head for a couple of weeks, in particular, the horizon line and the tree stump tangent pushing an image of a before and after.
Considering the speed at which the planet is being deforested, world powers are seemingly slow to move on protecting the trees and incidentally, our possible futures.
According to the World Resources Institute, more than 80 percent of the Earth’s forests already have been destroyed. Up to 90 percent of West Africa’s coastal rain forests have disappeared since 1900. Brazil and Indonesia, which contain the world’s two largest surviving regions of rain forest, are being stripped at an by logging, fires, and land-clearing for agriculture and cattle-grazing.
Among the obvious consequences of deforestation is the loss of living space. Seventy percent of the Earth’s land animals and plants reside in forests. Rain forests help generate rainfall in drought-prone countries elsewhere. Studies have shown that destruction of rain forests in such West African countries as Nigeria, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire may have caused two decades of droughts in the interior of Africa, with attendant hardship and famine.
Deforestation has global effects as well. Trees are natural consumers of carbon dioxide—one of the greenhouse gases whose buildup in the atmosphere contributes to global warming.
-Information and stats from National Geographic
Here's an interesting article at the NASA website.