| Environmental
Degradation/Deforestation
Environmental Degradation/Deforestation
Environmental Degradation, the decline in the health
of quality of natural surroundings, most often occurs as the result
of decisions made by individuals and governments for economic control
or material comfort. A prime example is the destruction that occurs
through deforestation, the removal of trees from land by the process
of clearing or stripping them away.
Country Total Forest
Area (sq km) Annual
Deforestation
(sq km) Annual
Deforestation
Rate
Brazil 5,439,050 23,090 4%
Ecuador 105,570 1,370
Indonesia 1,049,860 13,120
Philippines 57,890 890
Mexico 552,050 6,310
Dem. Rep.
Of the Congo
1,352,070
5,320
Causes:
Logging
agriculture (shifted cultivators/slash and burn)
agriculture (cash crops and cattle ranching)
fuelwood, paper, charcoal
large dams
mining and industry
colonization schemes
tourism
development and over-consumption = basic cause
exploitation by industrialized countries
debt burden of the country
poverty and overpopulation
If deforestation continues at current rates, scientists estimated
nearly 80 to 90% of tropical rainforest ecosystems will be destroyed
by the year 2020. This destruction is the main force driving a species
extinction rate unmatched in 65 million years. The Amazon Basin was
formed in the Paleozoic period, somewhere between 500 and 200 million
years ago. The extreme age of the region in geologic terms has much
to do with the relative infertility of the rainforest soil and the richness
and unique diversity of the plant and animal life. There are more fertile
areas in the Amazon River’s flood plain, where there are more
fertile areas in the Amazon River's flood plain, where the river deposits
richer soil brought from the Andes, which only formed 20 million years
ago. The rich diversity of plant species in the Amazon Rainforest is
the highest on earth. Experts show that one hectare (2.47 acres) may
contain over 750 types of trees and 1500 species of higher plants and
it is estimated that one hectare of Amazon rainforest contains about
900 tons of living plants. Altogether it contains the largest collection
of living plants and animal species in the world. The Andean mountain
range and the Amazon jungle are home to more than half of the world's
species of flora and fauna and one in five of all the birds in the world
live in the rainforests of the Amazon. To date, some 438,000 species
of plants of economic and social interest have been registered in the
region and many more have yet been cataloged or even discovered.
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If Amazonia were a country, it would be the 9th largest in the world.
The Amazon rainforest, the world’s greatest remaining natural
resource, is the most powerful and bio-actively diverse natural phenomenon
on the planet. It has been described as the “Lungs of our Planet”
because it provides the essential environmental world service of continuously
recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. It is estimated that over 20%
of the earth’s oxygen is produced in this area.
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Medicines from the Rainforest topic as to why to save the rainforest
Global Warming topic as to why to save the rainforest
Logging
Commercial logging is the single largest cause of rainforest destruction
both directly and indirectly. Logging tropical hardwoods like teak,
mahogany, rosewood and other timber for furniture, building materials,
charcoal and other wood products is big business and big profits. Several
species of tropical hardwoods are imported by developed counties, including
America, just to build coffins which are then buried or burned. The
demand, extraction and consumption of tropical hardwoods has been so
massive that some countries which have been traditional exporters of
tropical hardwoods are now importing them because they have already
exhausted their supply by destroying their native rainforests in slash
and burn operations. Japan is the largest importer of tropical woods.
Despite recent reductions, Japan's 1995 tropical timber import total
of 11,695,000 cubic meters is still gluttonous; damaging to the ecological,
biological and social fabric of tropical lands, and clearly unsustainable
for any length of time.
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Government Income
Logging rainforest timber is a large economic source, and in many cases,
the main source of revenues for servicing the national debt of developing
countries. Logging profits are real to these countries who must service
their debts, but are they are fleeting. Governments are selling their
assets too cheaply, and once the rainforest is gone, their source of
income is gone. Sadly, most of the real profits of the timber trade
are made not by the developing countries, but by multi-national companies
and industrialists of the northern hemisphere. These huge profit driven
companies pay governments a fraction of the timber's worth for large
logging concessions on immense tracts of rainforest land and reap huge
profits by harvesting the timber in the most economical manner feasible
with little regard to the destruction left in their wake. Logging concessions
in the Amazon are sold for as little as $2 per acre with logging companies
felling timber worth thousands of dollars per acre. Governments are
selling their natural resources, hawking for pennies, resources that
soon will be worth billions of dollars. Some of these government concessions
and land deals made with industrialists make the sale of Manhattan for
twenty-four dollars worth of trinkets look shrewd. Directly and indirectly,
the leading threats to rainforest ecosystems are governments and their
unbridled, unplanned and uncoordinated development of natural resources.
Rainforest timber exports and large scale development projects go a
long way in servicing national debt in many developing countries which
is why governments and, international aid-lending institutions like
the World Bank supports them. In the tropics, governments own or control
nearly 80 percent of tropical forests, so these forests stand or fall
according to government policy and in many countries, government policies
lie behind the wastage of forest resources. Besides the tax incentives
and credit subsidies which guarantee large profits to private investors
who convert forests to pastures and farms, governments allow private
concessionaires to log the national forests on terms that induce uneconomic
or wasteful uses of the public domain. Massive public expenditures on
highways, dams, plantations, and agricultural settlements, too often
supported by multilateral development lending, convert or destroy large
areas of forest for projects of questionable economic worth.
Tropical counties are among the poorest countries on Earth. Brazil alone
spends 40 percent of its annual income simply servicing its loans and
the per capita income of Brazil's people is less than $2,000 annually.
Sadly, these numbers don't even represent an accurate picture in the
Amazon because Brazil is one of the richer countries in South America.
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Paper, Fuelwood, and Charcoal
In addition to logging for exportation, rainforest wood stays in developing
countries for paper, fuel wood and charcoal. One single steel plant
in Brazil making steel for Japanese cars needs millions of tons of wood
each year to produce charcoal that can be used in the manufacture of
steel. Then there is the paper industry. A pulpwood project in the Brazilian
Amazon consists of a Japanese power plant and pulp mill. To set up this
single plant operation, 5,600 square miles of Amazon Rainforest was
burned to the ground and replanted with pulpwood trees. This single
manufacturing plant consumes 2,000 tons of surrounding rainforest wood
every day to produce 55 megawatts of electricity to run the plant. The
plant, which has been in operation since 1978, produces over 750 tons
of pulp for paper every 24 hours, worth approximately $500,000 and has
built 2,800 miles of roads through the Amazon rainforest to be used
by its 700 vehicles. In addition to this pulp mill, the world's biggest
pulp mill is the Aracruz mill in Brazil; its two units produce one million
tons of pulp a year and displaced thousands of indigenous tribes harvesting
the rainforest to keep the plant in business. V\7here does all this
pulp go? Aracruz's biggest customers are the United States, Belgium,
Great Britain, and Japan. More and more rainforest is destroyed to meet
the demand of developed world's paper industry which requires a staggering
200 million tons of wood each year simply to make paper. If the world
continues at the present rate, 4 billion tons of wood is estimated to
be consumed annually by the year 2020 in the paper industry alone.
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Mining
Even more rainforest is destroyed by mining operations. Brazil sits
on one of the worlds largest reserves of iron ore and has ample gold,
semiprecious and precious stones, natural gas and oil reserves as well.
Strip mining is common in the Amazon and huge chunks of rainforest land
is lost every year to mining operations.
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Grazing Land
As the demand in the Western world for cheap meat increases, more and
more rainforest is destroyed to provide grazing land for animals. In
South America alone, there are an estimated 220 million head of cattle,
20 million goats, 60 million pigs and 700 million chickens. Most of
Central and Latin America's tropical and temperate rainforests have
been lost to cattle operations to meet the world demand, and still the
cattle operations continue to move southward into the heart of the South
American Rainforests. To graze one steer in Amazonia, it takes two full
acres. Most of the ranchers in the Amazon operate at a loss, yielding
only paper profits purely as tax shelters. Rancher's fortunes are made
only when ranching is supported by government giveaways. A banker or
rich land owner in Brazil can slash and burn a huge tract of land in
the Amazon rainforest, seed it with grass for cattle and realize millions
of dollars worth of government-subsidized loans, tax-credits and write
offs in return for developing the land. These government development
schemes rarely make a profit actually selling cheap beef to industrialized
nations. One single cattle operation in Brazil that was co-owned by
British Barclays Bank and one of Brazil's wealthiest families was responsible
for the destruction of almost 500,000 acres of virgin rainforest. The
cattle operation never made a profit but government write-offs sheltered
huge logging profits earned off of logging other land in the Brazilian
rainforest owned by the same investors. These generous tax and credit
incentives have created over 29 million acres of large cattle ranches
in the Brazilian Amazon, even though the typical ranch could cover less
that half its costs without these subsidies.
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Subsistence Farming
Subsistence farming has for centuries been a driving force in the loss
of rainforest land and as populations explode in third world countries
in South American and the Far East, the impact has been profound. By
tradition, wild lands and unsettled lands in the rainforest are free
to those who clear the forest and till the soil. "Squatter's Rights"
still prevail and poor, hungry people show little enthusiasm for arguments
about the value of biodiversity or the plight of endangered species.
The present approach to rainforest cultivation produces wealth for a
few, for a short time because farming burned-off tracts of Amazon rainforest
seldom works for long. Less than ten percent of Amazonian soils are
suitable for sustained conventional agriculture. However lush they look,
rainforests often flourish on such nutrient-poor soils that they are
essentially "wet deserts," easier to damage and harder to
cultivate than any other soil. Most are exhausted by the time they have
produced three or four crops. Many of the thousands of homesteaders
who migrated from Brazil's cities to the wilds of the rainforest, responding
to the government's call of "land without men for men without land,"
have already had to abandon their depleted farms and move on, leaving
behind fields of baked clay dotted with stagnant pools of polluted water.
Experts agree that the path to conservation begins with helping these
local residents meet their own daily needs. Because of the infertility
of the soil, and the lack of knowledge of sustainable cultivation practices,
this type of agriculture strips the soil of nutrients within a few harvests
and the farmers continue to move farther into the rainforest in search
of new land. They must be helped and educated to break free of the need
to continually clear rainforest in search of fresh, fertile land if
the rainforest is to be saved
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Results
Once an area of rainforest has been logged, even if given the rare change
to re-grow, it can never became what it once was. The intricate ecosystem
nature devised is lost forever. Only 1-2 percent of light at the top
of a rainforest canopy manages to reach the forest floor below. Most
times when timber is harvested, the plants and animals of the original
forest becomes extinct, and trees and other plants that have evolved
over centuries to grow in the dark, humid environment below the canopy
simply cannot live out in the open. Even if only sections of land throughout
an area are destroyed, these remnants change drastically. Birds and
other animals cannot cross from one to another in the canopy, so plants
are not pollinated, seeds are not dispersed by the animals and the plants
around the edges are not surrounded by the high jungle humidity which
they need to grow properly. As a result, the remnants slowly become
degraded and die and the rains come and wash away the thin topsoil that
was previously protected by the canopy and this barren unfertile land
results in erosion. Sometimes the land is replanted in African grasses
for cattle operations and other times, more virgin rainforest is destroyed
for cattle operations because planting grass on recently burned land
has a better chance to grow.
Help Rainforest Countries Understand and Solve
These struggling Amazonian countries must also manage the most complex,
delicate and valuable forests remaining in the planet and the economic
and technological resources available to them are limited. They must
also endure a dramatic social and economic situation, plus deeply adverse
terms of trade and financial relationships with industrial countries.
Under such conditions, the possibility of them reaching sustainable
models of development alone are nearly impossible. There is a clear
need for industrial countries to sincerely and effectively assist the
tropics in a quest for sustainable forest management and development
if the remaining rainforests are to be saved. The governments of these
developing countries need help in learning how to manage and protect
their natural resources for long term profits while still managing to
service their debts and they must be given the incentives and tools
to do so. Programs to redefine the timber concessions so concessions
have greater incentives to guard the long-term health of the forest
and programs to revive and expand community-based forestry schemes,
which ensure more rational use of forests and a better life for the
people who live near them must be developed fIrst-world capital must
seek out opportunities to partner with organizations that have the technical
expertise to guide these programs of sustainable economic development.
In addition, programs teaching techniques for sustainable harvesting
practices and identifying profitable, yet sustainable forest products
can enable developing countries to improve the standard of living for
its people, service national debt and contribute meaningfully to the
country's land use planning and conservation of natural resources.
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