Rainforest Destruction
As our fragile planet travels on through space we are beginning to understand that everything that is alive is in interconnected harmony, and that damage to one part of our biosphere, for example Rainforest destruction, can have damaging ripple effects in other parts of our fragile ecosystem, including further deforestation and global warming.
Accelerating deforestation is particularly alarming. This is because the destruction of the last few remaining great forests is the result of our own deliberate effort, as opposed to climate change or some other convenient alibi. Setting aside the more obvious consequences of ozone depletion and global warming, rainforest destruction is especially worrying because it irrevocably extinguishes unique sub-biospheres that are unlikely to be rebuilt within the time frame left, according to some more sober global warming predictions.
Every deliberate act of rainforest destruction is a bizarre rehearsal for the global warming that will follow if the custodians of the earth cannot mend their ways. Deforestation destroys not just a piece of forest canopy, but also a portion of our fragile world. This is because the smaller trees and plants that the canopy previously sheltered cannot survive the direct rays of the sun, and so wither and die. By an ironic quirk of nature, young forest giants, too, do not survive without the initial protection of that lesser canopy. As a result an entire ecosystem vanishes forever, as do the human families, the mammals, the birds and the insects that once lived in harmony within it, leaving our planet a shamefully poorer place.
While it has become popular to blame subsistence farmers for rainforest destruction, this is not the whole truth. Almost all the huge logs that were once forest giants, and much of the food that is grown on the new farmlands, end up in the homes and on the tables of the word’s developed nations, who therefore drive the process and must share the bulk of the blame.
While forests still cover about thirty percent of the earth’s surface, deforestation is proceeding at an alarming rate and it is estimated that the lungs that make the oxygen we breathe will vanish forever within a hundred years, unless something is done to reverse the rate of rainforest destruction. Every year a forest the size of Panama disappears. Every month as many trees as grow in Britain are taken down. Every day is a bad day for global warming, as an area of forest as large as one of our cities is destroyed.
When stripped naked of the rhetoric of human greed, responsibility for rainforest destruction lies with the developed nations who – after obliterating their own natural resources – now look elsewhere for stopgap solutions to their own selfish needs. Every act of deforestation accelerates global warming. Every year that passes is one year less before the last great forests begin to wither under a collapsing ozone layer.
Responsibility for change lies with individuals, for only they have the power to change the mood of great corporates, and the governments they feed.
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