Amazon Deforestation Accelerating
The BBC is reporting that the Amazon rainforest is shrinking at an increasing rate. Twenty six thousand square kilometers were lost last year in Brazil alone, mostly to slash-and-burn deforesting, which amounts to about 0.4% of the total seven million square kilometers. While that may not sound like much, keep in mind that at that rate the rainforest will be completely gone in about 200 years, and with an acceleration that timespan will be even smaller.
It may seem that there is still quite a long time to solve the problem. There are ancillary problems, however. Islandization is the splitting up of once-connected geographical regions to produce smaller, isolated ecosystems. This can be a death blow to larger animals which require large roaming areas such as the jaguars of the Amazon. So while the total acreage is still appreciable, the biological impact can be simultaneously quite large.
The Amazon is one of a handful of biodiversity “hotspots” in the world. It houses approximately 20% of all birdlife on planet Earth, as well as 75,000 species of trees (according to Wikipedia). While many argue that investment in the environment is hardly worth the effort, a small investment in these ecological “hotspots” has a large rate of return. There are useful plant and animal species that are in extremely high density in the Amazon, so that environmental protection can be more effective than nearly any other location on the planet.
Edward O. Wilson, a Harvard myrmecologist has written a book entitled The Future of Life that delves into just such subjects. He takes a pragmatic viewpoint and concludes that humanity will realistically fundamentally change the biosphere, but ecological protection spearheaded by international NGO’s such as the The Nature Conservancy in a few key regions of the globe can have a lasting impact by preserving biodiversity.
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
| TrackBack URI
You can also bookmark
this on del.icio.us or check the cosmos