Do you know what it’s like? To drive through the country and see a patch of empty forest? To see the wreckage of what we do to our earth, right before our eyes? The heart aching feeling of having something taken away from you. Millions of animals; dead. The place thousands stay and the place they thrive; gone. Thousands of homes; lost. The one place they thought was safe; taken - and there’s nothing they can do. The feeling of not being able to protect the home they have. This is what millions of animals face daily from humanity’s acts of greed.

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Imagine standing in the quiet woodlands of the countryside, only the sounds of birds chirping ring in your ears with a soft, gentle breeze in the air. Animals scurry beyond the forest ground, create rustling throughout the endless shrubs and roots. Seconds later, imagine it torched and burnt with blazing fires, being scrapped like nothing, and destroyed within a blink of an eye. Forests the size of 27 football fields are cut or burned down every minute. The amount cut or burned per year is rising faster than we can recover. Deforestation is a huge issue has many effects on our health, planet and the animals that live on Earth. We, as human beings, need to cut the number of forests being demolished before it's too late.

We should care greatly because our health depends on it. According to research from the World Health Organization, 80% of our medicine relies on medicinal plants and traditional practices. As the forests continue to deplete smaller and smaller, these plants go along with it. This creates a problem for the loss of treatments and remedies for the global population. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates between 23% - 25% of worldwide diseases could be avoided by improved forestation management. Chris Elliot, the WWF’s (World Wide Fund for Nature) Executive Director of Conservation, says “it increases the spread of certain diseases while destroying plants... that may hold the key to treating illnesses that plague millions of people.” As stated by Elliot, these plants are crucial to mankind. Deforestation is only going to increase the number of sicknesses and decrease the amount of medicine for these illnesses. Imagine a world where the people have lost most of the medicine to cure the sick - there would be hardly any world at all. Some issues that have been developed are asthma, respiratory problems, and lack of oxygen to red blood cells. Plants and shrubs derived from the forests can do so much for the human body, such as heal wounds, cure cancer and HIV, malaria, the common flu, Alzheimer's, and many more. If we limit the number of forests being destroyed, it gives us a chance to discover new medicinal plants and use the ones that we already know can cure us before they’re all gone.

Limiting forest clear-cutting and increasing conservation areas around the world can help protect our planet. By putting caps on how much we can take for building structures and taking from our world, it could save us all. Deforestation is a huge issue has many effects on our Earth, our health, and the animals that live here. There are many other alternatives to the many things we use trees for every day, such as stones instead of trees for building, hemp instead of trees for paper, and many more. If we decide to keep the same rate of obliteration (which increases every year), all forests will be gone within 100 years. For the sake of Earth and its people, it is critical for this topic not to be ignored and pushed to the ground. Next time you take a drive through the countryside, see for yourself the destruction we as humans have caused.

I personally have witnessed destruction in my city of Attleboro, MA. Every day, there's a new hole between the trees and a new field ripped to shreds. The world that I've known and come to love for 14 years is dying, and it seems like many cannot comprehend the importance of the nature around us. Please, sign this petition and help save our forests and ourselves from abolishment.