Our World

Tropical Deforestation

As I was searching for topics to post, I found this article to have a lot of good information about deforestation in the world that has recently occurred. This article has many striking facts in it that sadden me. One thing that kind of struck me was that in the past 50 years, 40 % of Central America's tropical forests have been destroyedby being cut down or burned down. This connects back to the notes that we took in class today, and many of the same causes for deforestation that we talked about are listed in the article. Commercial industrialization was stated as being a huge cause to tropical deforestation, and the trees are constantly being cut down to create wood products for paper and such that we use foolishly. Another reason that was mentioned in the article was was that much of the lands are being taken over for cattle grazing. As we all know, meat has become a growing expense and delicacy for many people in the world. Instead of paying for meat at such a high cost, some people are deciding to raise their own cattle. Because of this, 2/3 of all the lowland tropical forests in Central America have been turned into cattle pasture. You can read more about this interesting article and the causes and effects of tropical deforestation at http://www.ru.org/32defore.html

posted by Anonymous @ 2/07/2006 06:58:00 PM