The madness of the destruction of tropical forests

Fifty years ago if you saw the most up to date land use map of the world, you would see huge swathes of land coloured dark green. There was dark green in the shape of a very large inverted “L” stretching around the Western part of equatorial Africa, and around the whole Amazon basin of South America. To the north and south of the land coloured dark green was a large strip of lighter green land, and beyond that the land was coloured, in the case of Africa, yellow.