Tell Your Representative to Save Our Forests with the REPLANT Act

From PennEnvironment (http://www.pennenvironment.org):

Forests used to cover half of the United States. But now? They only exist throughout one-third of our country.¹ When a forest is cut down, it can’t clean our air, protect our climate or shelter wildlife.

We recently celebrated Arbor Day, and we’re taking action. It’s a day that many Americans celebrate by planting a tree. But why stop at planting one tree when you can plant more than 1 billion?

Go to https://pennenvironment.webaction.org/p/dia/action4/common/public/?action_KEY=44120 to ask your U.S. House representative to pass the REPLANT Act to plant 1.2 billion trees in our national forests in the next decade.

When a forest’s trees are chopped down and turned into paper or wood products, the forest can’t protect the plants or animals that depend on them to find food, build nests, and shelter their young from dangerous predators. When we splinter their habitat with logging and development, they’re left with nowhere to go.

When it comes to cleaning our air, chopped down trees can’t purify our air from a filing cabinet. Without fans or frills, forests are also our best air purifiers — removing dirty particles, chemicals and soot that clog our air and even contribute to lung and heart disease.²

And that’s not all trees do: Tree-filled forests remove a lot of carbon dioxide from our air. In fact, if we counted tropical deforestation as a country, it would be the third-worst emitter of carbon dioxide in the world.³

That’s why we’re looking to trees as one of the keys to protecting our planet. Will you help bring 1.2 billion trees to our forests by supporting the REPLANT Act?

From the tops of the tallest timber trees to their roots far beneath, all of our forests’ trees play a pivotal role in protecting our planet.

But between 1990 and 2010, the U.S. lost an average 949,750 acres of forest each year — an area nearly the size of Rhode Island.⁴

If we want to protect our wildlife, our own health and the health of our planet, we have to help reverse the damage of deforestation. That’s where the REPLANT Act comes in. This critical act would ensure 1.2 billion trees are planted in our national forests and reforest more than 4 million acres across the country.

This Arbor Day, take part in planting a billion trees.

1. Andrea Becker, “Rates of Deforestation & Reforestation in the U.S.,” Seattle Pi, last accessed April 5, 2021.
2. Andrea Becker, “Rates of Deforestation & Reforestation in the U.S.,” Seattle Pi, last accessed April 5, 2021.
3. Christina Nunez, “Climate 101: Deforestation,” National Geographic, February 7, 2019.
4. Andrea Becker, “Rates of Deforestation & Reforestation in the U.S.,” Seattle Pi, last accessed April 5, 2021.