Save the Rainforest

See video here.

Each passing year, billions of acres of trees are cut down, sending many animals to the brink of extinction because of loggers.  Over three million species of the rarest and strangest animals live here.  Some Indian men (loggers) use elephants to log.  The elephants don’t clear out big spaces in the rainforest, they log trees far apart so it does not affect the forest.  This is a great solution, but if everybody started doing this, I’m afraid people would whip and abuse the elephants. 

The animals that are suffering include the slender loris, orangutan, gorilla, red-slanked langor, rhinoceros, elephant, and chimpanzee.  Also, rainforest tribes such as the Takuna, Kayapo, Pygmy, Huli, and Xanomami are dying out.  An area of a rainforest the size of a football field is destroyed each second.  The rainforest holds 2,000 species of butterflies and 8,000 of plants.  They hold two-thirds of all the plants in the world.  Many kinds of medicine, chocolate, vanilla, and plastic comes from rainforest plants, which are destroyed from logging and may make these valuable plants go extinct. 

Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface.  Now, they only cover 6% and experts estimate that the remaining rainforests could disappear in less than forty years because of logging.  Nearly half of the world’s plants, animals, and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest destruction.  Scientists estimate we are losing 137 plant, animal, and insect species every day.  As the rainforests disappear, so do many cures for life-threatening diseases. 

There were ten million native tribes living in the rainforest.  Today, there are less than 200,000.  In Brazil alone, colonists have destroyed about 90 indigenous tribes since the ‘80’s, and many kinds of medicine knowledge disappear with them.  The Amazon rainforest covers Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and the Eastern Andean region of Ecuador and Peru.  If the Amazon was a country, it would be the ninth largest in the world.  At least 80% of the world’s diet comes from tropical rainforests.  They include avocados, coconuts, figs, oranges, lemons, grapefruit, bananas, guavas, pineapples, mangos, tomatoes, corn, potatoes, rice, squash, yams, pepper, chocolate, vanilla, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, sugar cane, turmeric, coffee, Brazil nuts, and cashews.

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has identified 3,000 plants that could cure cancer in the rainforest, and pretty much all of these plants have been destroyed by logging.  To make logging minimal, people have made laws where you have to pay to log, but then people start logging illegally.

Why is logging in the rainforest bad?  Because it holds so many animals.  One pond in Brazil can hold more fish than all the lakes in Europe.  A 25 acre plot of rainforest can contain more than 700 species of trees equal to the total of tree species in North America.  A single rainforest in Peru is home to more birds than all the birds in the United States.  One tree in Peru was found to harbor forty-three different species of ants, which is the same number of ants in the British Isles.  The number of fish in the Amazon exceeds the number of fish found in the whole Atlantic ocean.  There are varieties of wild life found in the rainforest and scientists have only discovered and studied only some out of the millions of wonders that the rainforests hold. 

When an acre of rainforest is lost, the impact on the number of plants and animals is staggering.  Surprisingly, scientists have a better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than they have of how many species there are on earth.  The best estimate on finding this out is about 10 million and only 1.4 million out of the 10 million species have actually been named.  Today, rainforests only occupy 2 percent of the earth and 6 percent of the land surface, yet these remaining forests support over half of our planet’s plants and trees, and one-half of the world’s wildlife.  Hundreds of thousands of these rainforest species are being extinguished before they have even been discovered.  If this destruction continues, 90% of all rainforests could be gone in 2020.  This destruction is the main force driving the species extinction rate.  The Amazon rainforest is the world’s greatest remaining natural resource.  It has been described as the “lungs of our planet” because it provides the service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen.  More than 20% of the world’s oxygen comes from the Amazon and it may stop giving us oxygen if logging continues.  The main life force in the rainforests is the mighty Amazon river.  It starts high in the Andes mountains and flows more than 4,000 miles across the South American continent until it enters the Atlantic.

More than 2,000 species of fish have been identified.  Commercial logging is the largest cause for rainforest destruction.  Other big causes of rainforest destruction include clearing spaces in the forest for grazing animals, farming (especially soy bean and coffee bean farming).  People log tropical hardwoods for making charcoal, furniture, building materials, and other wood uses.    Some rainforest trees are imported to the United States just to build coffins, which are burned or buried.  Cardboard and wood chips are made with 15 ton machines that gobble up the rainforests with 8 foot revolving blades that have 8 points and revolve 320 times a minutes.  These machines gobble up about 200 trees into chips in minutes.  Loggers drive surviving natives to work for their logging companies as slaves.  One pulpwood project set up by a Japanese pulp mill factory to set up this project.  5,600 square miles of the Amazon rainforest were burned to the ground and replanted with pulpwood trees.  The biggest pulp mill was Aracruz mill in Brazil, which displaced thousands of native tribes.  In Brazil alone, more than 63,000 miles have been destroyed for cattle to graze.

To help rainforest trees, you must recycle, try to use phosphate-free laundry and dish soaps, don’t use electrical appliances for things that you can do easily by hand, like opening cans.  Try not to use paper or plastic bags.  Use re-usable containers.  Save wire coat hangers.  Don’t leave water running.  Install a water-saving shower head.  Don’t leave the lights on when you’re not at your house.  Don’t use the TV or other electrical appliances too much.  Start a compost pile.  Use the stairs instead of the elevator, and don’t buy products made from endangered animals.  Encourage your family and friends to save resources, too.  Thousands of rainforest trees are cut down each hour, killing plants and animals alike.  So, let’s do all we can to save them.