Destruction Of The Tropical Rain Forests: Part 1

Have you ever enjoyed being in a forest and breathing the cool, oxygenated air? The wonder of the world’s trees is that they extract more carbon from atmospheric carbon dioxide and release more oxygen back into the atmosphere than any other type of vegetation.

When the people of Europe and America were busy destroying their forests, not much was made of it because in the nineteenth century little was known about the enormous importance of the oxygen that forests produce. Nowadays it is well known that the carbon-to-oxygen process is important. Without it, carbon would build up in the atmosphere, speeding up the greenhouse effect. Nowhere is this process more important than in the tropics.

In recent years newspapers and magazines have devoted considerable space to the topic of the destruction of tropical rain forests. The Amazon Basin has the greatest forests in the world. The basin is as large as the United States. It and the large forest of Africa and Southeast Asia are the last remaining topical forest in the world. Because the warm, moist environment is more conducive to photosynthesis and therefore more oxygen production, tropical rain forests are environmentally more important than northern forests.

The Amazon Basin lies chiefly in Brazil. Brazilians have been anxious to develop their country so that they can increase their standard of living and international prestige. Brazilian planners have looked inland for the materials of growth and development, just as resourceful Americans and Canadians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries trekked across North America looking for wealth. After building a new capital city, Brasilia, 350 miles (560 km) from the coast Brazilian leaders began opening the Amazon region for cattle grazing, farming, and mineral exploitation. Many poor Brazilian farmers in the drylands of the Northeast, faced with a life of marginal subsistence, moved to the interior forest. They leveled the forest by burning it. Brazilian scientists estimate that there were 170,000 separate fires in the Amazon in 1987 alone. Likened by some to an environmental holocaust, the fires generate hundreds of millions of tons of gases that contribute to global warming and depletion of the earth’s protective ozone layer. At this very moment, in this one second, a stand of magnificent trees the size of a football field has been destroyed by fire.