Rainforests
The following report was written by the Rainforest Action Network
Visit their site - there is so much there to learn!
Rainforest Action Network (RAN) works to protect the
Earth's rainforests and support the rights of their inhabitants
through education, grassroots organizing and non-violent direct action.
Rainforests play a critical role in the atmosphere in part because they hold vast reserves of carbon in their vegetation. When rainforests are burned, or the trees are cut and left to decay, the carbon is released into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2). This is the second largest factor contributing to the greenhouse effect.
(Caufield, Catherine, In the Rainforest)

Rainforests have been evolving for 70 to 100 million years. They contain plants and animals that live nowhere else on earth. When a rainforest is destroyed, so are the plants and animals who have lived there for millions of years. Once they are destroyed, they will only be memories of our past - unless we help to preserve them now!

A rainforest cannot be replaced. Once it has been destroyed it will be gone forever. Once the web of interdependence has been broken, plants and animals have no way to rebuild their complex communities.
When rainforests are destroyed, animals living outside the tropics suffer as well. Songbirds, hummingbirds, warblers and thousands of other North American birds spend their winters in rainforests, returning to the same location year after year. Less return north each spring, as few make it through the winter because their habitat has been destroyed.
Many large mammals such as leopards and apes need miles and miles of territory to roam and have a tough time surviving in the smaller and fragmented habitats they are forced into by humans. Other species such as the golden toad, whose entire population lives on one mountain in Costa Rica, could become extinct within seconds from a bulldozer's crush.
Many of the foods we eat today originated in rainforests: avocado, banana, black pepper, Brazilian nuts, cayenne pepper, cassava/manioc, cashews, chocolate/cocoa, cinnamon, cloves, coconut, coffee, cola, corn/maize, eggplant, fig, ginger, guava, herbal tea ingredients (hibiscus flowers, orange flowers and peel, lemon grass), jalapeņo, lemon, orange, papaya, paprika, peanut, pineapple, rice, winter squash, sweet pepper, sugar, tomato, turmeric, vanilla, and Mexican yam. The wild strains still in the rainforests of many of these plants provide genetic materials essential to fortify our existing agricultural stock. Many other rainforest plants have great promise to become other staple foods. (Caufield, Catherine, In the Rainforest)
One fourth of the medicines available today owe their existence to plants. Seventy percent of the plants identified by the National Cancer Institute as useful in cancer treatment are found only in the rainforest. Drugs used to treat leukemia, Hodgkin's disease and other cancers come from rainforest plants, as do medicines for heart ailments, hypertension, arthritis and birth control. Yet fewer than 1% of tropical forest species have been thoroughly examined for their chemical compounds. (Myers, Norman, The Primary Source)
Many of our medicines come from plants that grow in rainforests. Perhaps someday the cure for cancer or AIDS will be found in a tropical rainforest. Some of the medicines we now use come from tropical rainforest plants, such as aspirin, heart disease treatment and painkillers.
RATES OF RAINFOREST LOSS
 
Rainforests cover less than two percent of the Earth's surface, yet they are home to some 40 to 50 percent of all life forms on our planet-as many as 30 million species of plants, animals and insects. The rainforests are quite simply, the richest, oldest, most productive and most complex ecosystems on Earth. As biologist Norman Myers notes, "rainforests are the finest celebration of nature ever known on the planet." And never before has nature's greatest orchestration been so threatened.
 
GLOBAL RATES OF DESTRUCTION (1)
2.4 acres (1 hectare) per second: equivalent to two U.S. football fields
149 acres (60 hectares) per minute
214,000 acres (86,000 hectares) per day: an area larger than New York City
78 million acres (31 million hectares) per year: an area larger than Poland
IN BRAZIL
5.4 million acres per year (estimate averaged for period 1979-1990) (2)
6 - 9 million indigenous people inhabited the Brazilian rainforest in 1500 In 1992, less than 200,000 remain. (3)
SPECIES EXTINCTION
Distinguished scientists estimate an average of 137 species of life forms are driven into extinction every day; or 50,000 each year. (4)
PROJECTED ECONOMIC VALUE OF ONE HECTARE IN THE PERUVIAN AMAZON (5)
$6,820 per year if intact forest is sustainably harvested for fruits, latex, and timber
$1,000 if clear-cut for commercial timber (not sustainably harvested)
$148 if used as cattle pasture
 
While you were reading the above statistics, approximately 149 acres of rainforest were destroyed. Within the next hour approximately 6 species will become extinct. While extinction is a natural process, the alarming rate of extinction today, comparable only to the extinction of the dinosaurs, is specifically human-induced and unprecedented. Experts agree that the number one cause of extinction is habitat destruction. Quite simply, when habitat is reduced, species disappear. In the rainforests, logging, cattle ranching, mining, oil extraction, hydroelectric dams and subsistence farming are the leading causes of habitat destruction. Indirectly, the leading threats to rainforests ecosystems are unbridled development, funded by international aid-lending institutions such as the World Bank, and the voracious consumer appetites of industrialized nations. If deforestation continues at current rates, scientists estimate nearly all tropical rainforest ecosystems will be destroyed by the year 2030.
 
Links:

World Wildlife Federation Rainforest Alliance Rainforest Information Centre - one of the most important rainforest activist organisations in the world. World Rainforest Movement - includes excellent news bulletins Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research (ACEER) Foundation committed to rainforest conservation through education and research. Planet Earth's biggest Environmental Directory, here you will find links to almost anything you will need.



 
Home

Backgrounds	Wolves	Poetry	My Wildcats	Greeting Cards
Friendship	Rainforests	POW/MIA	About Me	Domestic Violence R
Officer Down	Child Abuse	Lupus	Jess's Story	Win My Awards
K9 Memorial	Animal Abuse R	Help Links	Death of Innocence	Alcohol & Drug Abuse