Hug a tree while you still can: U.S. forests are disappearing

The Amazon rainforest and Indonesia's peat swamps aren't the only places suffering from deforestation. On the mainland U.S., swaths of forests are steadily disappearing, too. It's not just that we're losing trees. The forests themselves are growing farther and farther apart, researchers say. A new study found that the average distance between forest patches increased by nearly 1,690 feet — or about 14 percent — between 1992 and 2001.SEE ALSO: Meet the architect behind China's smog-su