September 2001
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NEWS


Rainforest Destruction and Prevention
By: Tyler M., Turner Fenton School, Mississauga, ON

VegetationDestruction of rainforests is increasing each day of each year. One of the major problems of destruction is the increasing rate of population growth. That will affect the destruction because the more people there is the more tropical resources we need from them. A few things we need are paper, tar, wood for housing, etc... By the year 2050 there will be more than 10 billion people living on this planet. The rate of destruction is 80 acres per minute, day, and night.

The most rainforest deforestation comes from South America. Traditionally there are three major sources of deforestation. They are farming, logging, and ranching. The most are from logging and ranching.

The reason why some people wreck the rainforests for farming is they may be too poor to buy any land. They need to tear down all the rainforests to make room to farm their crops. Most of the land they use is too poor of soil to re-use the following year or two years.

SunsetRanching is another big resource for deforestation. Ranchers use this land for a pasture for their cattle. This is another good place to raise and sell cattle for a good profit. During the 1980's about 16 million hectares were cut down to give a grazing area or a pasture for a lot of cattle.

The last reason for rainforest destruction is logging. Logging is used for making houses, furniture, pulp for making paper or cardboard. The plants and animals may grow back in a few years but they wont have nearly as plants and animals as they used to.

The rainforest has many reasons it helps in the world. One reason is that it turns carbon dioxide into clean air. The trees store carbon dioxide in their roots, stems, leaves, etc.. They also provide us with food, fuel, shelter, jobs and most important medicines. Think about if we could never find a cure for AIDS or other major diseases or cancers of all kinds. The rainforests continue to disappear all over the globe and we may never find the antidotes for the diseases that kill many people. (http://www.davesite.com/rainforests/index.shtml#intro).

The rainforests have many people living in them and they do not like the destruction of their homes. There are more than 1,000 Native groups living in the rainforests. In Brazil in the 1900's there were more than one million Natives living there. Today there are more than 200,000 Natives living in the Amazon rainforests.

There are many things people are doing to prevent rainforest destruction. Some people think that rainforests can be harvested without damaging the main variety of plants and animals. The people that are cutting the rainforests down, have to do careful planning to help prevent destroying a vast variety of plants and animals. They also can save the parts in the forests that have any kind of endangered species living in them, by finding out where the species live and then they wont cut down their home or habitat.