Hundreds of square miles of Burma’s ancient tropical forests have been stripped bare in recent years to fuel the increasing demand for wood products in China. China’s growing economy and a logging ban to protect the remaining forests in 18 Chinese provinces have led the country to look to neighboring countries to meet its need for more wood. Jim Harkness, director of the China office of World Wildlife Fund, said, “You have a situation where an environmentally beneficial policy in China created incentives to destroy forests in other parts of the world.” A bit of good news: The president of the 1,000-member Chinese group Friends of Nature recently became the first environmental activist elected to the standing committee of the Communist Party in China.
