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Agamu geegano wamanga:
RAIN FORESTS UNDER SIEGE
ADAPTED FROM AWAKE! VOL.71, NO: 6.
Man is ravaging the earth’s rain forests.
Y
et, these forests are very important to life on this planet. They are silent, beautiful factories –producers of oxygen, of food, of living things beyond number. If all forests are destroyed, life on earth will suffer immeasurably and they are vanishing fast! “Only God can make a tree,” wrote a poet. True. But no one destroys them like man.
Y
ou are wandering through a realm of green twilight, among the buttressed columns of trees that soar up to 15 stories overhead. Above you are a vast tangle of life, the densest, richest ecosphere on earth. The trees are festooned with vines hundreds or even thousands of feet long and are wreathed with plants that anchor themselves all over the trunks and branches. Lush tropical blossoms scent the still hothouse air.
Gone in one second!
This is the tropical rain forest. But it is more than a beauty spot, more than vaulted corridors of misty forest shot through with shafts of light. It is a mechanism of incredible complexity whose parts work together with humming precision.
Life is profuse here, a variety unequaled elsewhere on the land surface of our planet. The rain forests take up only 6 percent of the earth’s land area but have as much as half of all the plant and animal species. They produce about a third of all living material on the land. Far above you, the forest canopy is home to exotic insects and birds, to monkeys and other mammals. Most never come down to the ground at all. The trees feed and house them, and they in return pollinate the trees or eat their fruits, scattering the seeds in their droppings.
Rains pour down daily, drenching the forests and fueling their elaborate cycle of life. Rain washes leaves and wastes down the trunks in a nutrient-rich soup that nourishes the plants called epiphytes that grow on the trees. The epiphytes have leafy “tanks” that hold gallons of water, creating little ponds high in the air that are habitats for tree frogs, salamanders, and birds.
Whatever nourishment reaches the forest floor is quickly devoured. Mammals, hordes of insects, and bacteria all work together to reduce nuts, animal carcasses, and foliage to the level of waste material. Then the floor itself eagerly receives it. If you were to brush away the debris at your feet, you would find a thick, spongy mat of white fibers, a network of roots and fungi. These fungi help the roots to absorb the nutrients rapidly, before the rains wash them away.
But now suppose you’re wandering through the rain forest was limited to a small section, an area about the size of an American football field. Suddenly, that whole section of forest vanishes. It is completely destroyed in a single second! And as you watch in horror, the section next to yours, of the same size, is wiped out in the following second and another in the next, and on and on. Finally, you stand-alone on an empty plain, on earth baked hard under the glaring tropical sun.
According to some estimates, that is how fast the tropical rain forests of the world are being destroyed. Some put the rate even higher. According to Newsweek magazine, an area half the size of California is razed each year Scientific American magazine of September 1989 calls it an area the size of Switzerland and the Netherlands combined.
But whatever the extent, the damage is appalling. Deforestation has raised a global furor, and it is focused largely on a single country.
Case in point: Brazil
In 1987 satellite photographs of the Amazon basin showed that deforestation rates in this one area were higher than some estimates had been for deforestation of the whole planet! As the people burned the forest to clear it, fires by the thousands lighted the nights. The smoke cloud was the size of India and so dense that some airports had to close. By one estimate, the Amazon basin every year loses an area of rain forest the size of Belgium.
Brazilian environmentalist José Lutzenberger called it “the biggest holocaust in the history of life.” The world over, environmentalists are up in arms. They put the plight of the rain forests into the public spotlight. Even T-shirts and rock concerts proclaimed, “save the rain forest.” Then came financial pressure.
Brazil owes over a hundred thousand million dollars in foreign debt and must spend about 40 percent of its export earnings just to pay the interest. It is heavily dependent on foreign aid and loans. So international banks began to hold back loans that might be used to damage the forests. Developed nations offered to swap some of Brazil’s debt for improved protection of their environment. U.S president Bush even asked Japan not to lend Brazil funds to build a highway through virgin rain forests.
A Global Dilemma
To many Brazilians, all this pressure reeks of hypocrisy. The developed countries had long since decimated their own forests and would scarcely have allowed any foreign power to prevent them from doing so. The United States is currently wiping out the last of its own rain forests. They area not tropical, to be sure; they are the temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. Species will vanish there too.
(Picture) vanishing Rain Forests
So deforestation is a global problem, not just a Brazilian one. Tropical rain forest losses are most critical right now. Over half of those losses occur outside Brazil. Central Africa and Southeast Asia are the other two of the world’s great rain forest regions, and there too the forests are vanishing fast.
Deforestation has effects that are equally global. It means hunger, thirst, and death among millions. It is a problem that reaches right into your life. It touches the food you eat, the medicines you use, and the weather where you live-perhaps even the future of mankind.
But you may well wonder: ‘how can these rain forests have such far-reaching effects? What if they do vanish in a few decades, as some experts say they will? Will it really be that great a tragedy?’
Before we can answer those questions, another must come first: What causes the destruction of rain forests to begin with?
Who is killing the rain forests?
T
hat question is often answered by blaming the world’s poor. For centuries, peasants in tropical countries have farmed the land by slashing-and-burn agriculture. They fell a patch of forest and burn it, and either just before or just before or just after the burning, they plant crops. The forest’s ashes provide nutrients for crops.
This type of farming long ago uncovered a surprising truth about tropical rain forests. About 95 percent of them grow on very poor soils. The forest recycles nutrients so fast that they are mostly kept in the trees and vegetation well above ground, safe from the rains that would wash them out of the soil. The rain forest is therefore perfectly suited to its environment. The news is not quite as good for the farmer.
The plight of the poor
All too soon, the rains carry off the nutrients the ashes leave from the burned forest. Slowly, farming becomes a nightmare. A poor Bolivian farmer put it this way: “the first year, I cut the trees and burned them. And the corn grew tall and sweet in the ashes, and we all thought we had finally made it…. But since then, things have gone bad. The soil gets drier and drier, and it won’t grow anything but weeds…. And the pests? I’ve never seen so many kinds… We’ve just about done for.”
In times past, a farmer would simply fell new patches of forest and let the old plot of land lie fallow. Once the forest had returned to the earlier plots, it could be felled all over again. For this process to work, through, the cleared patches must be surrounded by the original forest so that insects, birds, and animals can scatter the seeds and pollinate the new saplings. This takes time.
The population explosion has also changed things, as farmers crowd together, the fallow periods get shorter and shorter. Often, migrant farmers simply exhaust their land in a few years and move on into the forest, burning it along a broad front.
Another factor aggravates the situation. Some two-thirds of the people in less developed countries depend on wood as fuel for cooking and heating. Over a thousand million people can meet their fuel needs only by cutting firewood faster than it is currently being replaced.
Deeper causes
It is easy to blame the poor. But as ecologists James D. Nations and Daniel I. Komer put it, that is like “blaming soldiers for causing wars.” They add: “they are mere pawns in a general’s game. To understand the colonists’ role in deforestation, one must ask why these families enter the rainforest in the first place. The answer is simple: because there is no land for them elsewhere.”
In one tropical country, some 72 percent of the land is owned by a mere 2 percent of the landowners. Meanwhile, some 83 percent of the farm families either have not enough land to survive on or have none at all. That pattern is repeated in varying degrees around the globe. Vast expanses of privately owned land are used, not to grow food for the local people, but to raise export crops to sell to wealthy nations in the temperate zones.
The logging industry is another famous culprit. Besides the direct damage it does to the forest, logging also makes rain forests more vulnerable to fires and to humans. Logging roads forged by bulldozer into virgin forest pave the way for advancing crowds of migrant farmers.
And when the farms fail, as they so often do, cattle ranchers buy up the land and turn it into pasture for grazing cattle. This is particularly so in South and Central America. Most of beef they raise is exported to wealthier nations. The average house cat in the United States eats more beef in a year than the average Central American does.
In the end, it is the developed nations that finance the demise of the tropical rain forests to fill their own voracious appetites. The exotic tropical woods, the produce, the beef, that they eagerly buy from tropical nations all require displacing or degrading the forest. American and European lust for cocaine has meant the clearing of hundreds of thousands of acres of rain forest in Peru to make way for the lucrative coca crops.
Agents of deforestation
Photo here.
The gains that sour
Many governments actively promote deforestation. They provide tax breaks for ranchers, timber companies, and export agriculture. Some nations will give a piece of land to a farmer if he “improves” it by clearing it of forest. One country in Southeast Asia has transported migrant farmers by the millions into its remote rain forests.
Such policies are defended as making use of the forests to benefit the poor to boost sagging economies. But as critics see it, even these short-term gains are illusory. For instances, land that was inhospitable to the farmer’s crops may be no friendlier to the rancher’s cattle. Ranches are commonly abandoned after ten years.
The timber industry often fares no better. When tropical hardwoods are extracted from the forest with no thought to the future, forests dwindle fast. The World Bank estimates that more than 20 of 33 countries currently exporting their tropical wood will run out of it within ten years. Thailand was drastically deforested that it had to outlaw all logging. It is estimated that the Philippines will be completely logged by he mid-1990’s.
But the bitterest irony is this: Studies have shown that a plot of rain forest can generate more income when it is left intact and its products-the fruit and the rubber, for instances-are harvested. Yes, more money than farming, ranching, or logging the same land. Yet the destruction goes on.
The globe cannot support this treatment forever. As the book saving the Tropical Forests puts it: “if we continue the present destruction the question is not if the rainforest will disappear but when.” But would the world really surfer if all the rain forests were destroyed?
Why save the rain forests?
A
Crowd is watching a soccer match and cheering wildly. They wish the game would last forever. But they keep shooting the players. One by one, the dead are carried off the field. The crowd becomes enraged when the game slows down.
Deforestation is much the same. Humans enjoy the forests, depend on them, infact. But they keep killing off the equivalent of the players: the individual species of plants and animals, whose complex interplay is what keeps the forest alive. This is more than a game, though. Deforestation affects you. It touches the quality of your life, even if you have never seen a rain forest.
It is the tremendous variety of living things, what scientists call biodiversity, that some argue is the greatest asset of the rain forests.
A fifth of a square mile of Malaysian rain forest may grow some 835 species of trees, more than in the United States and Canada combined.
But this lush complex of life is fragile. One scientist compared the individual species to the rivets on an airplane. The more rivets that pop loose, the more others begin to fail under increased stress, if that comparison is valid, our planet is one troubled “airplane.” As the rain forests shrink, some estimate that ten thousand species of plants and animals are lost every year, that the extinction rate is now some 400 times faster than it has ever been in the history of the planet.
Scientists bemoan the sheer loss of knowledge that comes from this drop in biodiversity. They say it is like burning a library before having read its books. But there are more tangible losses too. For example, some 25 percent of the medicines prescribed in the United States are based on tropical forest plants. One such medicine raised the remission rate for childhood leukemia from 20 percent in the 1960’s to 80 percent in 1985. So, according to the World Wildlife Fund, the rain forests “represent a
The role of the forest (picture here also)
Vast pharmacy.” And countless plants are yet undiscovered, let alone examined for possible medical use.
Furthermore, few of us realize how many of our food crops are derived from plants that were originally found in the rain forests. (See box on page 11.) To this day, scientists gather genes from the hardy, forest-dwelling varieties of these plants and use them to bolster resistance to disease in their more fragile descendants, the domestic crops. Scientists have saved hundreds of millions of dollars in crop losses that way.
Furthermore, we do not know what rain forest food may yet emerge as global favorites. Most North Americans do not know that just a hundred years ago, their forebears viewed the banana as a strange, exotic fruit and paid two dollars for one banana, individually wrapped.
The global picture
Man himself is the ultimate victim of forestation. The effects on global environment ripple outward until they circle the world. How? Let’s take another look at the typical rain forest. As the name implies, rain is its outstanding feature.
Effects of deforestation (picture here)
Over 30 feet in a year! The rain forest is perfectly designed to cope with this torrential downpour.
The canopy breaks the force of the droplets so that they cannot scour the earth away. Many leaves are equipped with elongated ends, or drip tips, that break up the heavy droplets. Thus, the pelting rain is reduced to steady dripping, which falls to the ground beneath with a softer impact. The tips also allow the leaves to shed water quickly so that they can get back to transpiration, returning moisture to the atmosphere. The root systems suck in 95 percent of the water that reaches the forest floor. As a whole, the forest absorbs rainfall like a gigantic sponge and then releases it slowly.
But with the forest gone, the rain falls straight and hard to the exposed soil and carries it off by the ton. For example, in CÔte d’Ivoire, West Africa, two and a half acres, as a deforested, cultivated plot, loses 90 tons of soil per year; as bare ground, 138 tons.
That kind of soil loss does more than ruin the ground for farming or grazing. Ironically, dams, which cause colossal amounts of deforestation, are themselves ruined by it. Overwhelmed by the silt carried by rivers from deforested areas, they swiftly clog up and are rendered useless. Coastal regions and spawning grounds are also fouled by the excess silt.
Effects on rain and weather patterns are even more disastrous. Rivers emerging from tropical rain forests are generally full year round. But without the forest to regulate the flow of water into the rivers, they overflow with sudden rains and the run dry. A cycle of floods and droughts emerges. Rain patterns may be affected for thousands of miles around, since a rain forest by transpiration contributes as much as half of the moisture in the local atmosphere. Thus, deforestation may have contributed to both the floods of Bangladesh and the droughts of Ethiopia that killed so many in this past decade.
But deforestation may also affect the climate of the entire planet. Rain forests have been called the earth’s green lung because they draw carbon dioxide from the air and use the carbon to build trunks and limbs and bark. When a forest is burned down, all that carbon is dumped into the atmosphere. The problem is, man is dumping so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (both by burning fossil fuels and by deforestation) that he may already have triggered a global warming trend called the greenhouse effect, which threatens to melt the planet’s polar ice caps and raise sea levels, inundating coastal regions.
Little wonder, then, that people all over the world are getting involved in the crisis. Are they helping? Is any solution held out? What hope is there in this dismal situation?
*See Awake! September 8th, 1989. *
Bounty from the rain forests
Is there a piece of tropical rain forest near you right now? Consider some of the foods that were originally found in the rain forests around the world: rice, corn, sweet potatoes, manioc (cassava, or tapioca), sugarcane, bananas, oranges, coffee, tomatoes, chocolate, pineapples, avocados, vanilla, grapefruit, a variety of nuts, spices, and tea. Fully half of the world’s food crops are based on plants that came from rain forests! And those are just some of the foods.
Consider the medicines: Alkaloids from vines are used as muscle relaxants prior to surgery; the active ingredients of hydrocortisone to fight inflammation, quinine to fight malaria, digitalis to treat heart failure, diosgenin in birth control pills, and ipecac to induce vomiting all come from rain forest plants. Other plants have shown promise in fighting AIDS and cancer, as well as diarrhea, fever, snakebite, and conjunctivitis and other eye disorders. What other cures might still lie hidden is unknown. Less than 1 percent of rain forest plant species have been examined by scientists. Lamented one botanist: “we’re destroying things we don’t even know exit.”
Yet more products come from the vanishing forests: latex, resins, waxes, acids, alcohols, flavorings, sweeteners, dyes, fibers such as those used in life jackets, the gum used to make chewing gum, bamboo, and rattan-in itself the basis for a vast, global industry.
Do the forests have a future?
O
N EASTER ISLAND in the South Pacific, great stone heads loom over grassy hillsides, staring blankly out over the sea. The people who built them dwindled away centuries ago. In the western United States, the ruins of ancient buildings in lonely wastelands are the only relics of a people who disappeared long before white men ever ventured there. Some Bible lands where civilization and commerce once prospered are now windswept deserts. Why?
In all three cases, part of the answer may be deforestation. Some experts feel that people had to abandon these areas because they wiped out the forests there. Without trees the land turned barren, so man moved on. But today man threatens to do the same to the entire planet. Will he? Can nothing stop the process?
Many are trying. In the Himalayas, women have reportedly hugged trees in desperate attempts to prevent loggers from felling them. In Malaysia, tribal forest dwellers have formed human chains to block oncoming loggers and their heavy machines.
The two hundred million people who make a living from rain forests have a very personal stake in the crisis. As civilization advances, native tribes retreat aver deeper into the forests, sometimes until they meet colonists advancing from the other side. Many tribes are wiped out by the outsiders’ diseases. Others, forced to adapt to the outside world, end up among the urban poor-alienated and dissolute. But the world is waking up to their plight. A mood of environmentalism has begun to sweep the globe.
Can environmentalists make the difference?
“Both the knowledge and technology exist to save the world’s tropical forests,” begins the book saving the tropical forests. The point has been demonstrated in parks around the world. Guanacaste National Park in Costa Rica is dedicated to replanting vast tracts of forest. Trees have been planted by the millions in such countries as Kenya, India, Haiti and China. But planting trees is not quite the same thing as restoring forests.
Sometimes “reforestation” is actually the commercial planting of a single species of tree, later to be harvested. This is hardly the same as the complex ecosystem of a rain forest. Besides, some say that a moist tropical rain forest can never be restored in its original complexity. No wonder that many environmentalists insist that preservation is better than restoration.
But preservation is not as easy as it sounds. If a tract of forest is too small, it won’t survive. Some environmentalists suggest that at least from 10 to 20 percent of the world’s rain forests should be set aside in reserves if they are to retain their wealth of diversity. But at present, only 3 percent of the rain forests of Africa are protected. In Southeast Asia the figure is 2 percent; in South America, 1 percent.
And some of those areas are protected only on paper. Parks and reserves fail when they are poorly planned or managed or when corrupt officials siphon park funds into their own pockets. Some even make money by granting logging concessions on the sly. Manpower is scarce too. In the Amazon, a single guard was assigned to protect an area of rain forest the size of France.
Environmentalists also urge that farmers be taught how to farm without depleting the soil so that they wouldn’t be forced to move on and fell more forest. Some have tried growing a wide variety of produce mixed in a single field, which discourages pests who feed on a single species. Fruit trees can shelter the soil from the tropical rains. Others have revived an ancient technique. They dig canals around small garden plots and shovel mud and algae from the canals onto the plots as nutrients for the crops. Fish may be raised in the canals as an additional food source. Such methods have already met with great success in experiments.
But teaching people “how” costs time and money and requires skills. Tropical nations often have too many immediate economic problems to make that kind of long-term investment. Even if technical know-how were widespread, however, it would not solve the problem. As Michael H. Robinson writes in saving the tropical forests: “The rainforests are being destroyed not out of ignorance or stupidity but largely because of poverty and greed.”
Deforestation here on Easter Island may have caused a civilization to vanish.
(Picture goes here)
By Armstrong Roberts.
The root of the problem
Poverty and greed. It seems that the deforestation crisis runs its roots deep into the fabric of human society, far deeper than the rain forest trees run their roots into the thin tropical soil. Is mankind capable of uprooting the problem?
A 24-nation summit meeting at The Hague, Netherlands, last year (1989) proposed the creation of a new authority within the United Nations, to be called Globe. According to the London Finance Times, globe would have “ an unprecedented range of powers to establish and enforce environmental standards.” Although nations would have to give up some of their cherished national sovereignty in order for Global to have any real power, some say that it is inevitable that such an organization will emerge one day. Only a unified, global agency could address global problems.
That stands to reason. But what human government or agency can eradicate greed and poverty? What government ever has? All too often they are based on greed, so they perpetuate poverty. No, if we are to wait for some human agency to solve the deforestation crisis, then the forests have no future; nor, infact, do humans.
But consider this. Do not the forests give evidence that they were designed by an immensely intelligent being? Yes, they do! From their roots to their leaves, the rain forests declare that they are the handiwork of a Master Architect.
Well, then, will this Great Architect allow man to wipe out all the rain forests and ruin our earth? An outstanding prophecy in the Bible answers this question directly. It reads: “But the nations became wrathful and your [God’s] own wrath came, the appointed time to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”-Revelation 11:8.
There are two remarkable things about that prophecy. First, it points to the time when man would actually be able to ruin the entire earth. When those words were written nearly two thousand years ago, man could no more ruin the earth than fly to the moon. But today he does both. Second, the prophecy answers the question of whether man will completely ruin the earth-with a resounding no!
God made man to take care of the earth and cultivate it, not strip it bare. In ancient Israel he set limits on they deforestation his people carried out as they conquered the Promised Land. (Deuteronomy 20:19,20) He promises that all mankind in the near future will live in harmony with the environment.1John 2:17;Jeremiah 10:10-12.
The Bible offers hope, hope for a time when man will cultivate the earth into a Paradise instead of bulldozing it into a desert, mend it instead of mauling it, tend it farsightedly instead of greedily milking it dry for a moment’s gain. The forests have a future. The corrupt system of things that is ruining them and all the earth has none.
So far 7 pictorials.
Why its published
It’s for the enlightenment of the entire family. It shows how to cope with today’s problems. It reports the news, tells about people in many lands, and examines religion and science. But it does more, probes beneath the surface and points to the real meaning behind current events, yet it always stays politically neutral and does not exalt one race above another.
Most importantly, this magazine builds confidence in the creator’s promise of a peaceful and secure new world before the generation that saw the events of 1914 passes away.
Printed in Britain, published simultaneously in the United States by watchtower Bible (WWW.WATCHTOWER.ORG) and tract society of New York Inc; 25 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, N.Y.11201, U.S.A.In England by Watch Tower Bible and Tract Society, Watch Tower House, The Ridgeway, London NW 7 RN, England.
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