John W. Reid

“The adjective “intact” is earned by encompassing at least 500 square kilometers—which is roughly 125,000 acres—free of roads, power lines, mines, cities, and industrial farms. That’s the size of about 60,000 soccer fields, 146 Central Parks, or a single square of land 14 miles on a side. “Landscapes” is added to the term because natural forests have vital treeless places, such as rivers, lakes, wetlands, and mountaintops mixed in. In 2008, the group helped map all such forests globally. Worldwide, there are currently around 2,000 intact forest landscapes, or IFLs, comprising nearly a quarter of all the planet’s wooded lands. They are heavily concentrated in the five megaforests.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet

“Megaforests hold staggering human diversity. Over a quarter of Earth’s languages are spoken in the world’s largest woodlands. The mere tally of languages, however, is less arresting than their particulars. Thousands of lexicons are deployed according to grammars that seem to test every possibility of human perception and cognition. They throw open the conceptual boxes within which each of us thinks and, in doing so, reveal the full spectacle of human inventiveness.”
― John W. Reid, Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet