You’ve probably heard that some 2×4’s are selling for $100 for ten-foot planks. According to Popular Mechanics this alone increases new buildings’ costs by 8%. This in turn increases old home valuations and rents. Trusted sources like Forbes say it’s temporary, due only to the supply/demand pop following the pandemic. They’re nuts.

Have you heard about the fires out west? How about the fires – and the clear-cutting and the mining – that have decimated 15% of the Amazon? How about the fires that have laid low almost 80% of the pantanal? Have you heard about the fires in the Siberian taiga?

These aren’t accidents. They’re caused. Climate change, clear-cutting and mining doesn’t happen on sand. It destroys and doesn’t replant millions of acres of timber with each breath you want to breathe.

Get real, Forbes. Of course immediate supply/demand causes a spike, but this spike ain’t coming down. It’s happening all over the world and a lot more than wood is being destroyed.

A Kenyan company (misnamed in the Kasanka article below as Tanzania) which is destroying much of Africa’s woodlands and wetlands just set up shop in New Jersey. Wonder why. Their bulldozer company, known in Africa as Lake Agro Limited doesn’t even have a website.

The Rai family made millions in Africa through wanton ecological slaughter. It so upset East Africans that the Rai’s have now fled to … New Jersey.

Today’s Rai battle is a great example. It’s over one of the most precious wetland/woodlands in all of Africa:

Kasanka National Park is in a remote western area of Zambia too difficult to get to easily, and the park is only 175 sq. miles large. It’s protected because of its 429 bird species but most importantly, because of its importance in the flyway of 10 million fruit bats which must land here for a couple months every year for food that is otherwise unavailable to them during those months.

The IUCN considers this straw-colored fruit bat near threatened with no doubt that the 7-10 sq. miles that Rai Industries [no website] Lake Agro Limited wants to dig up will send the species into a downwards spiral, upset the ecosystem, and destroy the wetlands and its associated woodlands.

So it’s not just big climate change fires. It’s also thousands of little fires like what’s happening to Kasanka all over the world, even as the world’s consciousness grows about climate change and the urgent need to conserve what we have.

Lumber comes from wood. Wood comes from forests. Forests are being burned, mined and decimated almost willy nilly. The culprits are fleeing to New Jersey.

And all that Forbes says is that it is “just temporary.”