"Environmentally friendly energy sources will not save the planet. Only untouched, human-free forests can preserve it."
Alexey Tikhonov
One of the most significant causes of adverse climate change is the alteration of air mass flows that transport precipitation, a consequence of the large-scale, uncompensated deforestation occurring across the planet.
The water cycle and life on the surface of this planet are sustained by vast forests. One of the most important factors influencing the movement of air masses in the atmosphere is the reduction in pressure at areas of maximum moisture condensation. This natural mechanism, designed by God to attract precipitation through forests, has been thoroughly explained by scientists from the St. Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics, including physicist Anastasia Mikhailovna Makarieva and Professor Viktor Georgievich Gorshkov.
Water vapor, evaporating from the surface of leaves, condenses in the colder upper layers of the atmosphere, which leads to a decrease in air pressure over the forest. This creates upward air currents that draw in moist air masses from the ocean, transporting them inland. After the rainfall, the dry air returns to the ocean through the upper layers of the atmosphere.

On the Earth’s surface, the wind blows toward areas with the highest moisture evaporation. This evaporation is greatest over forests, as forests have the largest surface area for evaporation per unit of land, thanks to the vast number of leaves.
This can be explained metaphorically: evaporation from several wet towels is greater than from a single towel. The ocean is like one large towel, while a forest is like many towels. When we cut down forests and replace them, for example, with grass, the amount of evaporated moisture drops sharply—first matching the ocean’s rate and then becoming significantly lower. Grasslands and sparse shrubs are more susceptible to drought.
As a result, the wind changes direction, blowing from the land toward the ocean. This is why deserts are always cut off from moisture; the wind in these areas consistently blows toward the sea.

The annual runoff of all rivers into the world’s oceans amounts to about 43,000 cubic kilometers, and for rivers not to dry up, regular precipitation in the same volumes is required. Forests, acting as giant natural pumps, play a crucial role in delivering the moisture necessary for life from the ocean to remote inland areas.
This process, often unnoticed by us, is essential for everyone. Therefore, it is crucial that everyone, including children, understands how this divine mechanism of moisture circulation works in nature to ensure it is not disrupted.
A portion of precipitation forms over the land through evaporation from its surface, but about one-third, or more precisely, 35 out of 100 centimeters of annual rainfall, comes from ocean evaporation. Without this oceanic moisture falling as rain or snow on land, glaciers, swamps, lakes, and rivers would completely dry up in less than ten years.
Of course, the “weather kitchen”—the movement of atmospheric fronts, the formation of cyclones, etc.—involves complex phenomena. However, the most significant process in transporting oceanic moisture to land is associated with forested areas and is known as the “forest biotic pump of atmospheric moisture.”
To understand how this works, we need to explain the process of transpiration—water evaporation from the surface of leaves. This is the “circulatory system” of plants, involving the continuous movement of water through plant stem vessels from roots to leaves. The speed of this movement is quite high, reaching about one meter per hour in herbaceous plants and up to eight meters per hour in tall trees.
Plant stem vessels (xylem) are thin tubes with diameters ranging from 0.01 to 0.2 millimeters. Due to capillary forces alone, water can only rise to a height of about three meters, whereas some trees reach heights of 50 or even 100 meters.
The upward movement of water from the roots to such heights occurs due to the cohesion between water molecules, a process driven by evaporation in the leaves. Scientifically, water evaporation in leaves reduces the water content in leaf cells, increasing the concentration of dissolved substances and lowering the water potential. As a result, water from the xylem, with a higher water potential, moves into the leaf cells through selectively permeable cell membranes.
However, as water exits the xylem vessels, tension is created in the water column, transmitted downward through the stem to the roots. This is made possible by water molecules’ cohesion, which allows them to “stick” together due to their polarity (dipole moment) and hold together through hydrogen bonds.
This tension in the xylem vessels can reach such strength that it pulls the entire water column upward. Estimates of the tensile strength of the xylem sap range from 3,000 to 30,000 kPa (or 30 to 300 atmospheres!). Finally, at the last stage, water tends to leave the plant because the water potential of the surrounding air is tens of thousands of kilopascals lower than that of the plant itself. Water leaves the plant primarily in the form of vapor through its leaves.
For water to turn into vapor, additional energy is needed, known as the latent heat of vaporization. This energy is provided by sunlight, which ultimately drives the transpiration process, moving water from the soil to the plant roots and from the roots to the stems and leaves.
The plant uses less than one percent of the water it absorbs from the soil for its life processes, while 99% passes through it and is returned to the atmosphere through leaf evaporation, contributing to the next rainfall. The amount of water a plant evaporates daily varies depending on temperature, light, and soil moisture. A sunflower evaporates up to one or two liters of water per day, while a century-old oak can evaporate more than 600 liters!
When necessary, plants can regulate water retention and evaporation. They do this by shedding leaves during droughts or cold seasons, storing moisture in mucous cells and cell walls, thickening the cuticle (the waxy layer covering the epidermis of leaves and stems), or using stomata—special pores in the epidermis responsible for gas exchange and up to 90% of water evaporation. These stomata can close during dry weather or at night when photosynthesis stops, slowing down evaporation.
In any case, the total leaf surface area in a dense forest, where neighboring trees’ crowns touch and intertwine, is many times greater than the ground surface area beneath it. Tree leaves form an evaporative surface that far exceeds the evaporation surface of an open ocean of the same size.
Moreover, transpiration (water evaporation through leaves) is not the only source of evaporation over a forest. Trees can also “intercept” significant amounts of atmospheric moisture—rain or snow—adding substantially to the forest’s overall evaporation, up to 30%. This is especially true for northern coniferous forests, where snow accumulations on trees ensure continued evaporation even in winter, attracting more snowfall.
In this way, an untouched forest can evaporate moisture almost year-round, much more intensively than an open ocean surface of the same temperature. The maximum evaporation from a forest, which corresponds to the global average solar energy absorbed by the Earth’s surface, is about two meters per year, while ocean surface evaporation is nearly half that—about 1.2 meters per year. Considering that the total leaf surface of plants is four times greater than the surface of all the land, it becomes clear how forest evaporation effectively competes with ocean evaporation. This plays a decisive role in maintaining continental water cycles, sustained by the forest’s biotic pump.
In addition to the “forest pump,” there are passive flows of various moist winds in coastal areas, capable of carrying moisture inland up to an average distance of 600 kilometers.
From all of this, a crucial conclusion arises for each of us: the destruction of forests—this unique creation of God—for someone’s commercial gain cannot be classified as anything other than a crime against life on Earth, including humanity itself. According to legal principles, ignorance of the law does not exempt one from punishment for its violation. Nature treats people the same way, forcing them to pay the highest price for their unwise, barbaric treatment of it. Those who are aware of a crime being planned or committed, and do nothing to stop the perpetrator, are subject to punishment as accomplices. Likewise, people who allow others to destroy the ecosystem will be punished by Nature and God for their passive complicity in this destruction.

Forests are primarily cut down for commercial purposes or burned to clear land for the meat industry, providing new pastures or forage crops. The harvested timber is mainly exported to economically developed countries: around 50% goes to Japan, and 40% to the USA and EU countries.
The wood is primarily used for paper production, leading to the daily creation of billions of newspapers and advertising leaflets that end up in the trash by the evening (our civilization is truly “paper-based”). Additionally, it is used for making furniture, building materials, chopsticks, and firewood.
We are currently living in a time of immense responsibility, where the future of our planet is at stake. If deforestation continues at its current pace, people will soon find it impossible to breathe as they do now, because there simply won’t be enough oxygen in the air. The tropical forests of South America, known as the “lungs of the Earth,” are shrinking every year, which threatens a global ecological disaster, as 50% of the world’s oxygen is produced by the forests in the Amazon basin.
Russia holds a quarter of the world’s forest resources, which produce oxygen only during the summer period. But even these forests are shrinking year by year. In Russia, two million hectares of forest are cut down annually, with only a small portion being restored.
People are making efforts to save endangered birds and animals, but saving them without preserving the forests is like keeping spare parts from a broken machine. Humanity doesn’t just need tiny nature reserves, comprising 2-3% of the Earth’s territory, preserved as monuments to nature, but rather functioning ecosystems that remain intact.
A forest is a complex community of trees and various living creatures: insects, bacteria, fungi, animals, and birds, for which it serves as both food and shelter. Dead trees stand, fall, and are consumed by bacteria, fungi, and insects at a specific rate. Animals eat the bark, branches, and leaves. All of this intricate activity within the forest community is aimed at maintaining maximum life sustainability on land, primarily by preserving the stability of the water cycle, without which life would be impossible.
To those who view the forest only in terms of the quality of its timber, which can be used in construction and woodworking, an untouched natural forest may appear somewhat decayed and cluttered with excessive amounts of dead, fallen trunks and branches. In an effort to get the best timber, people thin out trees, clear the forest of deadwood and underbrush, and burn dry branches. This not only reduces the forest’s ability to transpire moisture but also deprives the intricate community of organisms that sustain the forest of energy, food, and shelter.
Eliminating the forest cover in the planet’s major river basins will quickly lead to a decrease in water levels in rivers, causing droughts, floods, fires, partial desertification along the coasts, and complete desertification deep within the continents. The economic losses from this will far exceed the profits from selling the timber. Therefore, it is imperative to urgently reconsider global forest policies. First and foremost, the exploitation of remaining untouched forests in all river basin areas, not just a few kilometers along major rivers, and especially those adjacent to oceans and inland seas, must cease immediately.
We need to begin the systematic restoration of forest cover in areas adjacent to natural forests. Only in these regions will restored forests be able to sustainably maintain the water regime and, in the future, independently expand river basins. Forest cover can be restored over large parts of currently arid territories. History provides us with a good example.
Until the mid-20th century, the steppes around the Sea of Azov were sun-scorched wastelands, stretching far eastward—beyond the Don and Volga, into the Ural and Kazakh steppes. The southern part of Ukraine was periodically hit by so-called “black” dust storms, which occur in spring during dry weather on lands devoid of vegetation. Powerful winds would lift millions of tons of dust—fine soil particles—into the sky, carrying them over great distances.
In the spring of 1928, winds in central and southeastern Ukraine lifted more than 15 million tons of valuable black soil into the air, reducing its layer by 10-15 centimeters in one sweep.
The only salvation from dust storms and dry winds was the planting of forest belts around fields, which not only protected the fields from wind erosion but also improved the climate, soil moisture, and fertility, thus increasing crop yields. Prominent Russian agronomists V. Dokuchaev, P. Kostychev, and V. Williams, who developed the “grass field” system of farming, discussed and wrote about this. In this system, part of the cultivated fields was sown with perennial legumes and grasses to allow the land to rest and, with the help of living organisms in the soil, restore its fertility. The system also included the planting of protective forest belts along field borders and bodies of water.
For a long time, these ideas found no practical application because, under the tsarist regime, the land belonged to private individuals who lacked the resources or desire to implement them. After the formation of the USSR, all water and land, along with its resources and forests, became state property, or public heritage. Soviet water legislation, based on the nationalization of water resources, created the conditions for realizing grand projects developed by scientists. In 1948, Joseph Stalin signed a decree titled “On the Creation of Water-Protective and Shelter Forests, the Implementation of Grass Field Crop Rotations, and the Construction of Ponds and Reservoirs for Irrigating Desert Lands to Ensure High, Stable Yields in the Steppe and Forest-Steppe Regions of the European Part of the USSR.”
This was an unprecedented project on a global scale, developed by leading scientists and involving millions of people. The strength of this project lay in its unified will, comprehensive approach, and vast scale.
For the first time in history, forest shelter belts were being created, with a total length exceeding 5,300 kilometers and a width of 300 meters. To achieve this, collective farm workers and forest workers prepared 6,000 tons of seeds of tree and shrub species. The key roles in the shelter belts were assigned to long-lived trees, especially oak, along with yellow acacia, linden, ash, poplar, and three types of maple (Canadian, Tatar, and Norway maple). Shrubs such as raspberry and currant were planted to attract birds to control forest pests.
The system of state forest shelter belts was complemented by forest plantations on collective and state farm fields, covering an area of over five million hectares, for which farms were provided with special government loans. By 1955, 2,280 hectares of protective trees had been planted, and 44,228 ponds and reservoirs had been built. Gullies and ravines were reinforced with trees and shrubs, while natural hollows were turned into ponds with trees planted around them. Dams with water mills and power stations were built to maintain the flow of small rivers.
Additionally, special measures were taken to preserve and improve forest areas, and parks destroyed during the war were restored.
At the same time, grass field crop rotations were introduced on collective and state farms, ensuring the restoration of soil fertility.
The results were not long in coming. There was a stabilization of steppe ecosystems. Crop yields on fields surrounded by forest belts reached unprecedented levels. For example, grain crop yields increased by 25-30%, vegetable yields by 50-75%, and grass yields by 2-3 times.
The climate also began to improve. The amount of atmospheric precipitation increased due to the intensification of local moisture cycles. On fields protected by forests, up to 80% of the moisture was absorbed into the soil.* The unity of forest and field became evident, as did the need for unified management. Thus, Stalin’s plan combined environmental protection with high agricultural yields.
(*Footnote: In 1920, as an experiment, scientists and foresters planted the first hectares of forest in the dying steppe of the Astrakhan semi-desert, overcoming great difficulties. And the forest grew! When the temperature in the open steppe reached 53°C, the shade of the trees was 20% cooler, reducing soil evaporation by 20%. Observations at the Buzuluk forestry showed that a 7.5-meter pine tree collected 106 kg of frost and rime during winter. This means that even in winter, a small grove could “extract” several tons of moisture from the air!)
However, this project, planned until 1965, was not completed. After Stalin’s death in 1956, it was halted by Khrushchev, who sought to dismantle everything related to Stalin. Khrushchev is the one to whom we owe the fact that the world’s largest ecological program was not finished. Many forest belts were cut down, thousands of ponds and reservoirs were abandoned, and on Khrushchev’s orders, 570 forest protection stations created between 1949 and 1955 were shut down.
In Russia, many remember the tens of hectares of vineyards uprooted during Gorbachev’s anti-alcohol campaign. But no one recalls the hundreds of thousands of hectares of forest destroyed in the 1960s. The grass field system of farming has also been forgotten. New generations of agronomists no longer even know its essence, focusing instead on chemical fertilizers and pesticides. As a result, vast sums are spent on building chemical plants and transporting and applying chemicals. But the results have been bitter indeed—many valuable lands, including black soils, have been turned into saline wastelands. Water bodies have been polluted. Many beneficial birds, animals, and insects have died. Cancer cases have risen among the population. It is high time to revisit the experience of forest shelterbelt planting!
To this day, only fragments of state-protected forest shelter belts have survived. Yet even now, in dry years, crop yields on fields protected by these belts are 2-3 times higher than on unprotected lands. Experience shows that near these forest belts, the thickness of fertile black soil (chernozem) increases by 40 to 70 centimeters. The remaining shelter belts beautify the landscape and provide habitat for various small animals and birds.
We have already discussed how technological advancements have led to the overproduction of goods. Instead of reducing production by extending product lifespans and freeing up people’s time for self-development, family, and socially beneficial activities, manufacturers have reduced product durability to maintain production and sales volumes. As a result, the economy has taken a destructive course, with people engaged in producing goods that are intentionally designed to become waste quickly, forcing them to constantly replace these items with new ones that also soon become trash. To sustain the production of such short-lived goods (kitchen appliances, cars, etc.), a constant supply of the planet’s increasingly scarce resources is required—resources for which ever more brutal wars and regime changes are being fought.
Not long ago, nearly every village had a nearby forest, which served generations as an inexhaustible source of berries, medicinal and edible plants, firewood, and fodder for livestock. Many of these forests have now been cut down to increase arable land, leading to the disappearance of thousands of water bodies and rivers, a drop in groundwater levels, a decrease in soil and air humidity, a rise in average annual temperatures, and worsening climate conditions for plants, animals, and humans. All of this is now mistakenly or deliberately attributed to “global warming.”
By destroying the planet’s remaining lungs, economists are planning to “develop” Siberia and the Amazon rainforest, cutting them down “to create new jobs” and produce trillions of tons of additional waste.
Such an approach leads humanity only into a dead end. However, humans are rational beings, and reason guides us toward our greatest good.
Therefore, rational, noble people, particularly God-serving politicians, must redirect the economy toward a productive, new path that brings prosperity to everyone, including future generations.
By producing high-quality, long-lasting goods and not artificially inflating food prices or destroying crops to do so, people can easily be provided with everything they need for a fulfilling life. Instead of fighting for survival in a waste-based economy, people can be freed for activities beneficial to themselves and society, for spiritual development, and for transforming our planet into a flourishing, fruitful garden.
The Soviet experience of creating forest shelter belts is now referred to as “green frameworks,” and it has already been partially adopted in other countries. By drawing on this rich and positive experience, we can reforest and preserve a blooming Earth for future generations.
This can and should become a global project, aimed at uniting all people on Earth for their common good. An ecologically conscious humanity can secure unlimited water resources from restored river basins and regain the eternal fertility of its soils.
Caring for this planet is crucial for everyone, as many will be born here again. And perhaps not just once…
(The acknowledgment of reincarnation, a belief recognized in many religions, serves as an additional foundation for ecological thinking. If people truly understand that death does not equate to the annihilation of the self, and that they may have to be reborn here repeatedly until they reach spiritual perfection and attain love for God, then they will no longer be able to live by the principle of “after us, the flood.” Such awareness fosters a deeper responsibility toward the planet and future generations, as the consequences of our actions will affect the very world to which we may return.)
This article is an excerpt from Alexander Usanin’s book “Mother Earth. The Vedic Teaching on Life.”