“The trees are man’s best friends; but man has treated them as his worst enemies. The history of our race may be said to be the history of warfare upon the tree world. But while man has seemed to be the victor, his victories have brought upon him inevitable disasters.” -Nathaniel Egleston

They say that people don’t appreciate what they have until it’s gone, and that seems to be true pretty much everywhere you go. This applies to other people, it applies to animals, it applies to nature, it applies to time, and it even applies to love. Have a listen to Damien Rice’s heart-wrenching song, The Animals Were Gone,

while I tell you a story that has nothing to do with India, but takes place in my current city of Portland, OR.

Image credit: EncMstr of Wikimedia Commons.

This is Forest Park, one of the largest urban forests in the world. In the 1850s, most of what is now the park was logged, and a combination of settlers and developers planned to build on it. But without the vegetation there, and the stabilizing effect it has on the steep slopes and silty soil, repeated landslides foiled practically all of them. Long story short, the land needed the forest, and this in now the 19th largest city park in the United States.

Image credit: NASA’s Aqua Satellite / Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument, of a heavily deforested North Korea.

Vegetation is crucial for both water management and land management. Many of us have a vague idea in our heads that during the 1990s, there was a terrible famine in North Korea, resulting in the starvation deaths of more than two million people, and possibly many more than that. It’s well-documented that a tremendous flood in 1995 in the country was an extreme contributor to this, but what’s less well-known is that the primary reason for the flooding was not excessive rainfall, but the clear-cutting of forests that were necessary for soil stability and water management. Ostensibly, the clear-cut land was to be used for agriculture to increase the food supply, but without enough land devoted to the region’s soil and water management, it wound up being an agricultural nightmare from which the country has still not fully recovered.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user Alex Rio Brazil.

A similar thing almost happened to a large part of Brazil, but preservation and reforestation efforts seem to have that situation under control.

And now, with that in mind, we come to a similar but quite unique situation: to the Brahmaputra River that runs through Northern India, and a very large sandbar island within it in the country’s northeast corner: Majuli.