As strange as it may seem, cutting down trees, forest fires, or even the eruption of a volcano is not the cause of deforestation. The cause of deforestation is the loss of habitat for the trees. A good example is your home. If you were to leave your lawn alone and stop cutting the grass, after about 40 years, it would be difficult to find your house due to the trees. In most areas, the only reason your lawn doesn't return to forest is that you mow it.

It isn’t really loggers who are the cause of deforestation, it is us.  After all, we have homes with lawns, we eat food raised where there once were forests, and we travel on roads that replace and divide forests. All of these activities have changed permanently the land use of a forest to something else.

In much of the neotropics, and in many other parts of the world, forested land is considered idle land. Sure, you can harvest wood from it – but in most of the tropics, until recently, wood was considered cheap, because nearly everyone had a ready supply. It was far more productive to raise crops or cattle.

Costa Rica in recent generations experienced a very high rate of deforestation, because it was government policy that for a person to have their own land, all they had to do was improve it – and the easiest way was to cut down the forest, put a fence around the property, and raise cattle.

Deforestation spread exponentially in Costa Rica, as it has elsewhere, because people who successfully beat back the forest raised their families who also obtained land by clearing forest.