It's not that Klaus Toepfer hasn't felt all that. He is, after all, the world's most senior environmental official -- his title is executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) -- and he has spent his share of time blissed out in the spiritual retreat of a woodland.

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But his firm belief now -- and one that holds out a real potential for saving the best of the forests that are left -- is that the world's population must move beyond the emotional response to forests and focus instead on a few steely scientific facts.

The world's forests are vanishing. A landmark report from Mr. Toepfer's organization that came out with this week has catalogued the losses globally for the first time: Just 21 per cent of the Earth's land area is still covered with healthy forests. Healthy means at least 40 per cent of the forest's interlocking canopy is intact. And that means the forest still works to support wildlife and watersheds.

Not only are we losing these intricate ecosystems, but the richest patches of remaining forest will vanish within decades unless, as Mr. Toepfer put it, the world undergoes a "miraculous transformation" in its attitudes. His report argues that the best strategy is to take aim at the best forests left, with the fewest people around them, and save those.

The reason any of this matters is not because we stand to be emotionally poorer if these forests disappear, as Mr. Toepfer explained when contacted by telephone in Nairobi late last night. It's because humankind needs the remaining forests -- called the lungs of the planet -- to perform a raft of pretty basic services for sustaining life. Saving forests, he argues, is a case of self-interest that will save humanity money over the long term.

Healthy forests equal healthy ecosystems. Healthy ecosystems protect watersheds and soil and the DNA bank that has emerged after 3.5 billion years of evolution on this planet.

Not only that, but forests play an integral role in the carbon cycle of the Earth: Trees absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and reinject it into the plant cycle.

Take away enough trees and all those functions stop working. Species die out. (Primates are under particular threat.) Waters become fouled. Soil erodes. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere and alters climate patterns.

"These are assets of the highest value to this generation and future generations," Mr. Toepfer says. "There is a huge and important return on these assets."

The cost is not just future misery, but the hard-cash expense of trying to recreate all those biological services with machines, assuming it would even be possible.

The challenge is to understand all that and protect the planet's forests. And in that, Canada has a unique and richly ironic role to play.

Mr. Toepfer's report found that Canada has the second-largest area of canopied forests left in the world (behind Russia). Some are among the world's only remaining frontier forests, which means humans have not -- so far -- penetrated their depths. Better still, Canada is the only G7 country with vast tracts of forest remaining. Or, as Mr. Toepfer put it: "Canada is the most important forested country in the G7."

The irony comes in because Canada's wealth stems, in part, from generations of turning forests into board-feet, shakes and shingles and agricultural land. Now, having embraced the lumberjack and the farmer as part of our national identity, we're being called upon to be leaders and help developing countries that still have forests left to stop cutting them down. "Canada has an outstanding experience and responsibility in this field," says Mr. Toepfer.

It's not actually as ridiculous as it sounds. Canada may have cut down millions of trees, but it has learned a lot along the way about how to do it in a way that can be sustained over time. We have some of the best forestry and aquatics scientists in the world. The president of UNEP's governing body is none other than David Anderson, Canada's Environment Minister.

As well, we have a healthy -- and occasionally vocal -- middle class to pressure politicians on these issues, public pressure being one of the key strategies contained in the UNEP report.

Canada has also used its economic prestige to help put in place a couple of critical pieces of international policy that could end up having a massive impact on the world's forests. During the Bonn round of negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol in July, Canada helped establish the Clean Development Mechanism. This will allow developed countries like Canada to gain credits against their own carbon-dioxide emissions by preventing emissions somewhere else in the world. That means investing in energy efficiency, renewable energy and forests in other countries. All of that could help trees.

Meanwhile, some developing countries have launched their own programs to preserve their forests. Backed by primatologists from the University of Wisconsin and the World Wildlife Fund, a group of landowners in the tiny Central American nation of Belize decided in 1985 to leave a fringe of forest around farmers' fields so that the Black Howler monkeys would have corridors to move in. They also committed parcels of land to a nature preserve, which has grown to about 5,200 hectares. The local economy now benefits from ecotourism, and local people report that deer are reappearing in the area. Where 59 species of birds were recorded in 1989, that number has risen to 250.

Belize's solutions are piecemeal and depend in part on North American support. But they signify a small step toward seeing these remaining canopied forests as an international good that all countries have to bear in mind. Further down the road, the goal is for the international community to establish clearer rules for when such a forest can be cut down.

Mr. Toepfer has a raft of other innovative fixes. Now that UNEP knows what forests are in the best shape, it has launched programs in Africa and Indonesia to protect the habitats of some of the endangered great apes. The organization hopes to tap the growing thirst among wealthy tourists to venture into the homelands of the gorilla, chimpanzee, bonobo and orangutan.

He suggests that rich countries might pay poor countries for keeping their forests intact. Developed countries could send discounted lumber to those countries whose rich virgin forests can still be preserved. He's also considering a Debt-for-Nature swap that would see rich countries cancel some foreign debts of developing countries in return for protecting critical canopied forests that remain.

So far, such strategies are pretty theoretical. The good news is our newfound clear-headedness about what is at risk. Preserving what's left of the planet's forests is not an emotional issue. This is as practical as the air we breathe.

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