Deforestation: Causes and Solutions.

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Deforestation: Causes and Solutions

Deforestation is a major global problem with serious consequences to the planet. These consequences have negative effects on the climate, biodiversity, the atmosphere, and threatens the cultural and physical survival of indigenous peoples. Effects of deforestation are too great to continue destroying the forests.

There are many causes for deforestation. The first and most important cause is wood extraction. Wood has always been a primary forest product for human populations and industrial interests. Since wood is an important structural component of any forest, its removal has immediate implications on forest health. Intensive harvests can lead to severe degradation, even beyond a forests capacity to recover. When the soil has been stripped of its nutrients, farmers move further into the forests in search of new land. And perhaps the worst culprit of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is cattle ranching. 38% of deforestation in the Amazon wasdue to large scale cattle ranching. Mining for valuable resources also plays a major role.

Deforestation has many devastating effects. It affects climate significantly, in part because the forest plays a major role in the water cycle, recycling rain back into the clouds as it receives rainfall. As a result, when the land is cleared, flooding and drought become serious problems, as rainwater travels quickly through the ground without the forest to regulate it.

The burning and felling of the forests is also exacerbating the Greenhouse Effect: aproxamately 10% of the heat-trapping carbon dioxide released into the atmsphere in 1987 was a result of the fires in the Amazon. It threatens the existence of indigenous peoples. There have been more extinctions of tribal peoples in this century than any other, with Brazil losing 87 tribes between 1900 and 1950.

Deforestation robs the world of countless species, destroying crucial biodiversity and losing species with potential uses in medicine, agriculture and industry. Biodiversity is important because it contributes to resiliency. A world without biodiversity would be fragile and likely to amplify disturbance into catastrophe through the collapse of ecosystems that had lost keystone species. Thus, biodiversity reduction, combined with climate change, has the potential to spin out of control and to threaten the prosperity of global civilization. Already the scale of biodiversity caused by the present generation of human activities ranks with the great prehistoric extinctions. Recovery from this level of disturbance will require tens of millions of years.

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At the close of the twentieth century, the world finds itself undergoing the most rapid and complete deforestation it has ever expierenced under the human hand. Since 1950,

Satellite view of the Amazon

Before deforestation, the fullness of the forest was evident as no gaps between trees were seen for miles and miles. After deforestation, the land becomes extremely dry, uninhabitable and useless.

a fifth of the world's forest cover has been removed. At least 55% of the world's 30 to 40 million hectares of the rare but incredibly productive rainforest have been ...

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