Deforestation is much the same.

Deforestation affects you.

Deforestation has raised a global furor, and it is focused largely on a single country.

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!

Some justify deforestation of small areas by reasoning that the forest will bounce back and grow a fresh layer of greenery over a stretch of clear-cut land in much the same way our body grows a fresh layer of skin over a cut in a finger.

So although deforestation is not, as some claim, turning green forests into red deserts, it is turning parts of the Amazon rain forest into a weak imitation of the original.

In all three cases, part of the answer may be deforestation.

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.

Because of deforestation, Nepal is now losing millions of tons of topsoil every year.

In other parts of the world, deforestation has led to desertification and changes in local climate.

To help tackle the causes of deforestation and improve man’s living conditions in the Amazon rain forest, the Commission on Development and Environment for Amazonia published a document recommending that, among other things, the governments in the Amazon basin take three initial steps.

“One of the more efficient options to reduce deforestation,” notes the commission, “is to invest in some of the poorest areas in Amazonian countries, those that force populations to migrate to the Amazon to seek a better future.”

Violent crime, drug abuse, the spread of AIDS, water and air pollution, and deforestation are just a few of the developments that are making an impact on us all.

Massive deforestation is killing off untold species of animals and plants.

Rapid deforestation occurs in the development of almost every country.

Many cities in Asia and Africa are now surrounded by areas of almost total deforestation.

TROPICAL deforestation.

The combined rate of tropical deforestation for nine countries​—in Asia, Africa, and South America—​more than tripled during the 1980’s!

To understand the colonists’ role in deforestation, one must ask why these families enter the rainforest in the first place.

Many governments actively promote deforestation.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN warns that “if present rates of deforestation continue, much of the world’s tropical forests could be destroyed.”

If this trend continues, an estimated 10 to 20 percent of earth’s plant and animal life could be wiped out by the year 2000 unless deforestation can be stopped and reversed.

“Hunting, deforestation, and fires are not the only threats to the survival of plants and animals,” reports Brazil’s Jornal do Commercio.

Fragmentation occurs when small patches of forest are spared deforestation.

Burnings in the Amazon region are up 28 percent over last year, according to satellite data, and 1994 deforestation figures, the most recent available, show a 34 percent increase since 1991.”

In the Central and South American rain forests, cattle ranching is another major cause of deforestation.

“And at the current rate of deforestation it is projected that several countries, including El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nigeria and the Ivory Coast, will have destroyed all their forests in 30 years.”

Environmentalists have been concerned because widespread deforestation contributes to the warming of the atmosphere and increases the greenhouse effect, as well as triggers widespread flooding, such as has occurred in Bangladesh, India, the Sudan, and Thailand.

Deforestation has already had a severe and immediate impact on much of the world.

The felling and selling of tremendous tracts of trees guarantees the deforestation of Fiji within 20 years, of Thailand by the turn of the century, and of the lowland rain forest of the Philippines by 1990, Science Digest reports.