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CAN OUR RAIN FOREST BE SAVED?
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The Rape of the Rain Forests.
In a world plagued by so many problems, is conservation of the rain forests that important? What do we stand to lose if they disappear?
ONCE upon a time, a broad emerald belt girdled our planet. Trees of every kind made up its fabric, and broad rivers laced its surface.
Like a huge natural greenhouse, it was a realm of beauty and diversity. Half the world's species of animals, birds, and insects lived there. But although it was the most bounteous region on earth, it was also fragile—more fragile than anyone imagined.
The tropical rain forest, as we now call it, seemed immense—and almost indestructible. It was not. The rain forest first began to disappear from the Caribbean islands. As early as 1671—ten years before the dodo bird became extinct—sugar plantations swallowed up the forest on Barbados.* Other islands in the region went through a similar experience, a foretaste of a global trend that has accelerated in the 20th century.
Today tropical rain forests carpet only 5 percent of the earth's surface, compared with 12 percent a century ago. And every year an area of forest greater than the size of England, or 50,000 square miles [130,000 sq km], is felled or burned.
This appalling rate of destruction threatens to condemn the rain forest—along with its inhabitants—to the same fate as the dodo. "It's dangerous to say the forest will disappear by a particular year, but unless things change, the forest will disappear," warns Philip Fearnside, a rain-forest researcher in Brazil. Diana Jean Schemo reported during October last year: "Data in recent weeks suggest that the burning going on in Brazil this year is greater than what has occurred in Indonesia, where major cities have been smothered under blankets of smoke that spread to other countries. . . . Burnings in the Amazon region are up 28 percent over last year, according to satellite data, and 1994 deforestation figures, the most recent available, show a 34 percent increase since 1991."
www.watchtower.org/e/19980508/article_01.htm
