■ Decline of forests and illegal logging
Change in extent of forest and other wooded land 1990-2000
FAO“State of the World’s Forest 2001,2005“
Every year, forests worth about one third of Japanese land (12million ha) disappear world-wide. Rain forests in South-east Asia, Central America, and Africa are obviously, and also temperate forests in Russia are detected to be disappearing.
 
We have been using large amount of timber in the daily life to build temples, shrines, and houses and to make furniture, tools, and firewood. Even though we have been through a big economic growth and have come to heavily rely on chemical plastic products, we still use timber a lot ---60% of all the houses are wooden made, demand of timber is 85 million m3, consumption of paper products made mainly from timber tip is 30 million ton, and 25 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks are consumed yearly.
We import timber from all over the world---North America (the U.S.A and Canada), South Pacific ( Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea, etc), North Pacific ( Russia, etc), South America ( Brazil and Chile, etc), EU ( Finland etc), New Zealand, and Australia. Even not taking the illegal logging which accelerates the issue of the destruction of forests into account, Japan should bear the responsibility for the decline of forests because we import large amount of timber from Indonesia and Russia via China which is allegedly logged illegally.
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Background of Woodmiles
Global environment issues and timber 
