13 photos that show how humans have changed the world's forests

National parks around the US faced sanitation and vandalism issues during the 2019 government shutdown over President Trump's proposed border wall because of minimal staffing. Joshua Tree National Park was hit particularly hard, with vandals spraying rocks with graffiti and cutting down its namesake trees. The damage could take 200 to 300 years to repair, The New York Times reported.

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Nearly half of Indonesia's annual 3.2 million tons of plastic waste ends up in the ocean, according to a 2015 study.

Slash-and-burn forest fires may be an efficient way to clear land for new plantations, but they pollute the air with haze. Air quality in Queenstown, Singapore, reached unhealthy levels due to slash and burn fires in 2016.

Indonesia lost 840,000 hectares of forest in 2012 compared to 460,000 hectares in Brazil, according to a report in the Nature Climate Change journal. Palm oil, pulp, and paper production has increased greenhouse gas emissions and endangered the local population of tigers.

Deforestation due to logging, forest fires, and palm oil plantations has forced local tribes from their ancestral homelands and endangered animals such as orangutans, leopards, and elephants.

In 2017, Indian forest guards removed a leopard from a residential area at the state zoological park in Guwahati, Assam.

Sudan's charcoal and fuel wood trades are partially to blame for the loss of forest.

Bolsonaro plans to cut down more of the Amazon rain forest, saying that too many environmentally protected areas are hampering the country's development. Business Insider previously reported that indigenous communities are calling for the creation of a "sacred corridor of life and culture" that would span the Amazon from the Andes mountains to the Atlantic Ocean.

Brazil is the world's top exporter of beef, and the second top soy exporter behind the US. Farmers raze the rainforest to keep up with the global demand.

In Iberia, a Peruvian town located along the Interoceanic Highway, many of its residents rely on harvesting latex from the forest as a source of income. Iberia's deforestation levels steadily climbed from low to medium to high between 2012 and 2015, according to Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP).

SBS News reports that illegal logging in the Amazon in Brazil contributed to a 14% increase in deforested land between July 2017 and July 2018. The following year, Reuters reported that deforestation increased 29.5%.

In addition to destroying parts of the Amazon jungle, "wildcat mining" drives child labor and sex trafficking in the region, according to NBC News. Peru's government declared a state of emergency in February, enlisting its military to eliminate illegal mining machinery.

Hydraulic mining uses high-pressure water jets to dislodge rocks and sediment. At Agua Branca gold mining village in Pará, Brazil, the leftover mud forms murky pools.