My Topic: Deforestation

Most people aren't aware of how deforestation affects the world. We don't realize how bad it is to cut down trees and clear forests in order to use that land for other "goods". Until recently, I didn't really know how important trees are to the environment. I always thought of them as being used mainly for paper and wood to construct new buildings. I also didn't realize how fast trees are being cut down.

I learned so far that trees hold in the Carbon Dioxide from the air and release the Oxygen that we need to breathe. The cause of burning trees, coal and oil is that it releases carbon into the atmosphere. At the time the book was written, "over six billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere a year"(42). Carbon is then creating a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, which is what is causing the climate to change dramatically.

Trees also hold in a lot of water in its roots, which later gets released as vapor into the atmosphere, which, then, allows for more rain to continually come. Wiping down all these rainforests make it so that little by little you will start seeing less rain coming down and eventually that land becomes denuded; this process is called desertification.

One big reason why forests are being cut down is to create agriculture to grow beef for export in the US. They’re cutting all these useful trees so that these cheap burger companies can expand for corporate greed.

On this website, I also realized that by cutting down forests, we are also losing certain plants and animals that live in these habitats. If we keep this up many of these species can later become extinct, just like a lot of other species that are slowly dying off due to changes of climate and global warming.

Some solutions that I seen on this website, were to: “curb the felling of trees, by employing a series of rules and laws to govern it”, banning the clear cutting of forests, and also to replace cut down trees by planting younger trees in its place.