Deforestation: Life Threatening for Humans Too

Feb - 15 2017 | By

Deforestation is the act of permanently removing trees for mainly commercial reasons such as clearing land for building or for lumber. The problem is, we as a species are cutting down way more trees in a short period of time that can grow back. Many animal species are losing their homes because of deforestation. And that doesn’t just count for birds or small mammals. Most all primates, koalas, insects, and reptiles count on the forest to keep them safe.

An estimated 18 million acres (the size of Panama) of forest are lost each year. Forests can’t grow back as fast as they are being destroyed, especially if they are being taken down for building purposes. Deforestation is a global problem, not just something gone wrong in America.

Tropical forests are a huge issue when dealing with deforestation because such forests are home to millions of plant and animal species yet to be discovered and already in danger of going extinct. About half of the world’s rain-forests are gone. It is predicted that if deforestation persists like it has been, the world’s rain-forests will be gone in less than 100 years. The most notable countries doing deforestation include Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other parts of Africa, and parts of Eastern Europe. But deforestation isn’t a new thing, since the 1600s, the United States of America have lost 90 percent of their indigenous forests.

But deforestation itself isn’t the only problem. The methods of removing so many trees at a time include clear-cutting and burning/ slash and burn. Clear-cutting means the cutting down of entire forests at a time, a detrimental act to nature that is on the level of a volcanic eruption (according to the Natural Resources Defense Council). By burning forests down, they are gone quickly and is used as an agriculture technique as the ashes of the trees are a good nourishment for the agriculture growing there. But once that nourishment dissolves, weeds grow and farmers slash and burn a new plot of trees; new trees take a long time to regrow in those areas.

Deforestation also is a factor in global warming, in my last post I mentioned how nearly all ecological problems lead back to global warming. Not only do trees store carbon dioxide from the air when they are alive and once they die they can no longer respire that carbon dioxide into oxygen, but once these trees die and are removed, they release the carbon dioxide they had stored. which goes back into the atmosphere and ups the amount of carbon in the air even more. Deforestation is the second largest human-caused source of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, ranging between 6 percent and 17 percent.

But this doesn’t have to be the way it is, deforestation doesn’t have to be our demise. Some organizations and farmers try to sort of the problem where if they need to cut down trees for their projects, they plant and protect new trees of the same amount. They’re attempting to plant new forests. Of course we’re gonna need a lot more help to bring back animals to these forests and protect their numbers, but every little bit helps. Wood isn’t always needed for fuel and lumber isn’t always needed for homes, and there’s more eco friendly ways to build a grow as a society that doesn’t involve cutting down trees that generations of the past didn’t have access to.

Deforestation is a real problem. But it isn’t a problem that can’t be fixed.

Sources:

http://www.livescience.com/27692-deforestation.html

 

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