Argentina has lost three-quarters of its native forest to farming over the past century.

ECONOMIST: Pros and cons of the soya boom

Higher yields, he pointed out, saved marginal land and forest from farming.

ECONOMIST: Norman Borlaug

They razed the forest to accommodate crop farming, and local tribes were reduced to selling trinkets at the oil camps, or to retreating further into the bush.

NEWYORKER: Reversal of Fortune

And the intrepid value players are finding them in some of the most unlikely areas of the economy, such as farming and the struggling forest-products industry.

FORBES: Valmont Industries And Weyerhaeuser: Enticing Value Plays on Irrigation And Timber

In the fall of 1941, in Nazi-occupied Belarus (just east of Poland), where Jews were being executed by the thousands, four brothers from a large farming family named Bielski went into the forest along with a few other people determined to survive.

NEWYORKER: Defiance

There has long been opposition to the prospect of a gold mine and processing plant being built at Skouries in the Halkidiki peninsula, with some residents objecting to what they say will be the destruction of the environment and of pristine forest in the area, leading to the loss of tourism and other local activities such as farming, the rearing of livestock and fishing.

NPR: Masked Intruders Raid Greek Gold Mining Company