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Images of
Rain Forest Destruction
Compliments of
Mongabay.com
Photographs by Rhett Butler
Mongabay.com is a great resource website for more
information about rain forests.
EXTENT:
Tropical rainforests, clustered around the
earth in a band on either side of the equator, cover 1,500,000 square
miles, about 2% of the world's total land mass. Almost 60% are located
in the Amazonian regions of Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Bolivia, Africa and
Venezuela. Other regions of the world with significant tracts of
tropical rain forests are Papau-New Guinea, Burma and Indonesia.
Outside of the tropics, temperate rainforests are found in British Columbia, Oregon, Washington, Alaska, California's northern coast, the Caucasus region of Georgia, Norway, Scotland, parts of the Balkans, Japan, Tasmania, Chile, New Zealand and Australia.
BIODIVERSITY: Rainforests contain an incredible variety of different flora and fauna, with the total number of species numbering over 10 million. Rainforests are home to two-thirds of all the living animal and plant species on the planet and it has been estimated that many hundreds of millions of new species of plants, insects and microorganisms are still undiscovered. Tropical forests are regions of the highest biodiversity found anywhere on earth, far more than any other region. The whole of the North American continent, for example, is home to approximately 17,000 plants species while a much smaller area, the Amazonian Basin, has over 50,000.
IMPORTANCE: The rain forests of the world are supremely important to the world ecosystem as climatic and environmental stabilizers. The trees of the rain forests bind up over 200 billion tons of carbon in their bodies, carbon that otherwise might be in the form of carbon dioxide and contribute to the growing greenhouse effect. Without healthy rain forests, the global warming problem we are now experiencing will seem minor in comparison.
Rainforests also are the source for a large number of products that are of importance to man, including timber, nuts, fruits, oils, and spices and 25% of all prescription pharmaceuticals are derived from plants found there. The medicinal potential and promise of rain forests has barely been touched, and only one in ten tropical rain forest plants have even been studied for medicinal uses.
WORLDWIDE DEVASTATION:
The tropical rainforests of the world
are currently
being converted to nonproductive forest and agricultural lands at a rate
of 25,000 square miles, an area the size of West Virginia, each year.
In many tropical
countries, the majority of deforestation results from the actions of
poor subsistence cultivators. However, not all recent deforestation can
be linked to peasant farming. Most destruction of tropical rainforests
can be directly linked to excessive and widespread commercial
exploitation, including clearing of land for pastureland, mining,
hydroelectric projects and subsistence farming. The outcome of linear thinking that sees the rain forests
only as a resource to be exploited.
Once rain forest is destroyed for these other uses, agricultural or for cattle, it takes a long time for it to regenerate, 50 to 120 years, and in massive slash and burn operations, it may never return. What took eons to create can not easily be brought back. And the tragedy is that most of the converted uses are miserable failures. Rain forest cleared to make room for farming soon sees crop failure due to the nutrient poor topsoil, a condition not necessary in a healthy rain forest where much of the biological activity takes place in the tree canopies above the forest floor. For most farmers, one good year is all they get and they then must abandon the land.
At this junction, it is then sold, for almost nothing to large
cattle operations, most of which export their beef to American and
Europe where it ends up as fast-food hamburgers. This is in many ways a
final insult, since the fast food culture is one of the major reasons
these countries are now experiencing major obesity epidemics.
Sadly then, the one of the
byproducts of the destruction of the rainforests is excess fat on
overweight Americans and Europeans. A horrific cycle of
destruction and human stupidity if there ever was one.
Deforestation: Tropical Forests in Decline -1999
Deforestation in the Amazon -2004
Human Pressure On The Brazilian Amazonian Forests 2002
National Geographic: Eye In The Sky -Deforestation And Desertification
NASA: Tropical Deforestation Fact Sheet