earth’s equator. The daily temperature averages in at seventy-five degrees, with twelve hours of sun shining everyday in the tropics. Average annual rainfall is between eighty and one hundred inches, while some forests receive four hundred inches o

f rain a year. “Occupying no more than seven percent of all the space on earth, they harbor at least half-possibly seventy-five percent -of all forms of life” (Stone 75). This makes it apparent that the importance of rain forests directly effects the world’s ever-expanding human population and how we are linked to the massive pressures on tropical rain forests. At one time photographs taken from a satellite of the earth a quarter of a century ago revealed a green belt widely spread interrupted only by the oceans. This expansive ring of vegetation remained unchanged for fifty million years. However, today’s trees cover merely one third of our earth. Today the picture is strikingly different. According to Roger Stone, reporter of USA Today, “Planet Earth once contained approximately 6,750,000 square miles of closed canopy rain forest” (74). Unfortunately, each year another two percent of this priceless treasure is lost. At these present rates of destruction, there will be only few small patches of tropical forests remaining beyond the year 2050. There are a variety of factors why we are losing so much of our world’s rain forests, yet the principle reason is also the simplest. Ignorance of people’s basic ambitions to work the forest’s soil and live off land is this reason. To illustrate this, author Peter Farb states that, “In the past forty years, half of the world’s valuable tropical rain forests have been cleared away” (116). Culprits, such as cattle ranchers, multinational corporations, and even world governments are being held responsible for such actions. Due to these and many others, an area the size of Pennsylvania is deforested each year, being eliminated at a rate of fifty to one hundred acres every minute. The first major problem is burning of the land areas. This slash and burn agriculture occurs when the trees are cut down by farmers and then burned where they lie. The general problem here is that most of the useful nutrients are in the living organisms, the trees, and not in the topsoil. When a forest is cut down and burned, there is a fine layer of ash which crops can grow in for just a few years. However, once the crops absorb all of the nutrients, the land becomes worthless and remains a wasteland. Unless the farmer can afford to purchase commercial fertilizer, which is very unlikely, he/she is now forced to move along and repeat this same process. The burning of the rain forests also contributes to the greenhouse effect. It is the gradual warming of our atmosphere due to the reradiate greenhouse gases (water vapor and carbon dioxide) that get trapped in our atmosphere. However, no matter how gradual it may seem, it will catch up with us eventually. “The rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century will be about 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade; this is greater than that seen over the past ten thousand years” (Rosillo-Calle 130). Since trees absorb carbon dioxide, the loss of rain forests destroys one of the great natural sinks for this gas. With excessive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the sun’s heat is trapped, preventing it from radiating back into space. This gradual warming of the atmosphere would cause polar ice caps to melt and flood coastlines. A temperature increase could also turn productive farmland into desert. The second major problem is timber cutting, or logging. An estimated twenty-five thousand square miles are being cut for logging each year. Annually, each American uses an average of forty-seven pounds of paper, which is made from wood, and two hundred and five board feet of lumber. In fact, author Daniel Janzen writes that, “In the United States, the timber industry cuts irreplaceable strands of old-growth forests, trees at least two hundred years old, from northern California to Washington State at an alarming rate” (84). Forty-nine percent of the timber harvest goes into saw logs for building and industry, while twenty-thre

Some topics in this essay:
Peter Farb, Gimi Indians, Alaska Brazil, Rain Forest, Weather Climate, California Washington, Tropical Forests, Earth Universe, According Farb, Latin America, rain forests, tropical rain, tropical rain forests, rain forest, ninety percent, human population, tropical forests, third world, carbon dioxide, cattle ranchers, world countries, third world countries, gradual warming atmosphere, hundred twenty-seven species,