Steven Lefevor
Natural Disasters 1700
Deforestation
Our forests are being cut down for countless reasons, some of those reasons are to expand the production of farmer’s crops, or to provide more grazing areas for livestock, but mostly deforestation is occurring for the sake of making money. Our society counts on products like wood and paper, and so we’ve created logging operations that cut down our rainforests in order to produce these different products, but its slowly effecting our world and atmosphere more and more.
As a species we have expanded and grown taking down countless other species. The rainforest is home to several thousands of different species, some of which are getting close to extinction. They rely on the trees for several different things. The trees trap in the cold and heat during certain parts of the day, and they help keep everything moist. This process that the trees go through is what has helped create and maintain some of these species, and because we are tarring the trees down it is slowly depleting some of these fragile species. We the human species are to blame for this.
When we think about deforestation we think about the rainforest, and the country that comes to mind first is Brazil. While Brazil does contribute a large amount to the deforestation of the world there are other countries that also contribute as well. If you look at the map below you can see that Brazil is the number one leading country in deforestation, then Indonesia, and then Russia. Even our own country is on this map as number seven in deforestation
Why is deforestation occurring you may ask? Why is it with all our technology these days that we need to be tarring down the rainforest? As much as we want to be able to go paperless with everything we do these days, that’s still really hard to do, and not everyone is able to do that, not every country in the world has the resources to do that. We still do require paper for certain things, and we also require wood for building still. So because the rainforest does obviously have a lot of trees that’s we’re pulling resources from first. For other countries to it’s an easy source of income for workers.
Another reason that deforestation occurs is also by natural causes. Some examples of things that might lead to deforestation by natural causes would be things like fires, droughts, climate change, and overpopulation of animals. Sometimes a fire may happen taking out large amounts of forest areas, animals, and shelter. When a fire happens it is very harmful to the forest because it basically wipes out any kind of previous life and vegetation from before and may affect the growth of any vegetation in the future.
It’s been said that if we continue on the path were on now the forests will be gone within the next one hundred years, so people have tried to create ways to keep things equal and not further harm the rainforests. One thing people are suggesting is that basically any time we cut a tree down we plant a new one, this way things hopefully don’t get any worse than they already are.
We also are able to help from our own homes. Just by recycling that is helping our environment in some way. We’re able to buy recycled or certified wood products these days, and we can also choose to support only companies who have zero deforestation policies. By setting an example and teaching other people about deforestation and how to stop it we could help our world a lot.
Reflection
Deforestation impacts everyone, and I think that’s what I’ve learned the most from my research, it’s not just a problem in certain states in the U.S., it’s not just a problem for our country, but it’s a problem for the entire world. The rain forest trees help with the absorption of greenhouse gases that go into the atmosphere, and without trees global warming will happen faster. It’s also just sad to me to think about the countless animal species that are being killed because their habitats are being destroyed at overwhelming speeds. I like the idea of planting a tree for each tree that is destroyed, I don’t think it’s a fix, but I think it would be a great start.
Sources
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Deforestation.html