Deforestation and its Effects on the Environment
Once named the Green Planet, Earth is turning brown and slowly vanishing. The main reason is from deforestation. The meaning of Deforestation is the act of massively removing the forests in an area to the point the land can no longer be used to maintain and nature any form life, be it a tree to even a seed. Although deforestation is not caused by nature, it is caused by mankind. Deforestation, caused by mankind, is spoiling the Earth’s soil, killing exotic wildlife, land and sea animals, mammals, and especially permanently damaging our climate. While some of the causes of dead mammal, and marine life are unknown, it is always linked to humankind’s actions. If the process continues the Green
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Forests are able to create oxygen by using carbon dioxide while supplying every single living being oxygen for survival. To begin, the early days of deforestation started when traveling settlers needed wood to suit their needs for both hunting and living needs. While they benefited from using trees to build their tools and equipment, they did not know that they were leaving small scars on Earth’s forests. During the Industrial revolution they had to remove millions of acres of forests for their business for survive or become more efficient. Aside from the industrialization, the millions of acres of land could have been an area where it could had helped to reduce the carbon dioxide, pollution, and other low level harmful chemicals that lead to asthma, and other health problems, which is why clearing forests is one of major and somehow blinded problem in the world. In the industrial point of view the chemicals can be harmful as it may contain mercury, silicon, radiation, and other chemicals that could make the area around the dump zone become toxic, to the point it is enough to become radioactive to mutate genes in living beings and lead them to death. You need to add more background/historical information about how deforestation progressed. (Industrialization, …show more content…
The negative effects are the high CO2 (Carbon Dioxide) within the oceans because as the more CO2 the ocean takes in the less oxygen there is for sea life, as Peter Hannam says “Warming seas absorb less oxygen at the surface. Another effect of a changing climate is the oceans turn over less” that said when there is not much oxygen going around that every living being requires to live, and one the major causes is that warm water will not switch places with cold water, for the oxygen to move to deep water where it is necessary for unknown sea life to
Deforestation has accumulated many multifaceted controversies over time. The main one, however, is the impact deforestation has on water flow. People have different perceptions on how deforestation affects the flow of water, this lead to a controversy between conservationists and a group of theorists. Many years ago, water was used as a way for almost all the mills to function. Changes in the ecosystem depend on the rate and extent of deforestation and determines how drastic the changes will be.
“The Earth is 4.6 billion years old. Scaling to 46 years, human have been here 4 hours, the industrial revolution began 1 minute ago, and in that time, we’ve destroyed more than half the world’s forests.” - Unknown. One major environmental problem in our world is deforestation - what is that, you ask? According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, deforestation is the action or process of clearing of forests. Some consequences of this include a large contribution to global warming and climate change (about 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year), loss of biodiversity especially in tropical rainforests, and the extinction of many known or yet to be discovered species. But, through some Debt-for-Nature Swaps, leaving forests
What would happen if one day the Amazon rainforest disappeared? The Amazon rainforest will disappear is not an assumption. It absolutely will be happen if people keep on deforesting the Amazon rainforest for many different demands. Huge amounts of area in Amazon were deforested because of agricultural pursuits. Also, the deforestation rate has increased in other ways, such as obtain more land for living and excessive uses of wood. Therefore, a large amount of trees were cut down and led to forest destruction. People have done these kinds of activities for many years and these deforestation activities have brought a lot of permanent and long term issues. Although the society has started to consider the problem of deforestation, it is not easy to solve the issues completely. The land desertification can be a huge area and it is almost cannot be able to control. In addition, it is not only threatening the people and animals in the Amazon, the world is also threatened by deforestation. Thus, deforestation is one of the biggest problems in the world that people have to consider because it costs three main long term effects: land desertification, species extinction and climate transformation.
This article describes the history of deforestation around the world and explaining how deforestation started as part of a civilizing process. Then the article tells that human populations increase causes deforestation because humans need more land for food, water, and for living purposes. Also in the last part of the article it talks about how the future of deforestation is worse than the present, even with our reforestation efforts the environment is being destroyed to fast for us to stop especially in the
Deforestation began with man’s ability to manipulate his environment. Wood has always been a primary source for shelter and has been affected by human expansion. As the worlds population grew, so to did the need for wood to make housing. As cities grew so did the demand for space to accommodate the growing population. Throughout history and even today, man has manipulated the environment affecting it’s resources.
Environmental issues affect every life on this planet from the smallest parasite to the human race. There are many resources that humans and animal needs to survive; some of the most obvious resources come from the forests. Forests make up a large percentage of the globe. The forests have global implications not just on life but on the quality of it. Trees improve the quality of the air that species breath, determine rainfall and replenish the atmosphere. The wood from the forests are used everyday form many useful resources. Moreover, thinning the forests increases the amount of available light, nutrients and water for the remaining trees. Deforestation (forest thinning) is one of the most critical issues of environmental problems that are occurring today.
General Information: First off, deforestation is the clearing of forests or areas with trees to be converted into something else after. There are a few different ways forests are cleared. Clear cutting is simply removing everything in sight. Patch cutting is the removal of trees in specified patches. Strip cutting is removing trees in selected strips. The most environmentally friendly method is known as selective cutting. This is the removal of only selected trees, leaving the others un-harmed. The technique used most during deforestation is the slash and burn technique. This uses the basic cutting method of clear cutting, but afterwards everything that remains is burned to ash.
Deforestation, defined by biologist Charles Southwick as "the destruction of forests; may involve clear-cutting or selective logging" (p. 365), is a predominantly human-driven process that is dramatically altering ecosystems worldwide. "Clear-cutting" involves the indiscriminant removal of every single plant and tree species from within a selected area. The other major process of deforestation, "selective logging," focuses removal efforts on only specific, predetermined tree species within a chosen area. The statistics gathered about human deforestation over time are considerable, and they can be somewhat controversial. Depending on the source and the location selected, the magnitude of deforestation varies. Southwick estimates that, approximately 10,000 years ago, 6.2 billion hectares (23.9 million square miles) of forest existed on earth (p. 117). That figure is equivalent to 45.5% of the earth's total land. He further estimates that, by 1990, this amount had declined 30%, with only 4.3 billion hectares of forest remaining (p. 117). Southwick also acknowledges other estimates that place the total amount of deforestation between 50% and 75% (p. 117). NASA has similar deforestation statistics that confirm these trends. According to their website, 16.5% of the Brazilian Amazon forests have been destroyed. They also note similar magnitudes of deforestation in Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Thailand, and Vietnam), despite the significantly smaller total area of forest within these countries. These grim figures are somewhat tempered by the NASA finding that, over the past ten years, the deforestation rate has declined from 6,200 square miles per year to 4,800 square miles per year. Though this trend is n...
It will change the water cycle due to warmer temperatures. Some areas will get more precipitation and storms, while others will get nothing and have serious droughts. Warming to a few degrees will cause glaciers to melt and sea ice to melt, leading to a lot of damage. This damage would lead the levels of the oceans to rise and would cause damage to coastal cities and islands. This would cause serious problems for the different species living in the oceans and could cause some disease.
Forests are vital for life and have many important functions. They are home to millions of species and protect soil from erosion. Along with this they produce oxygen which is vital for human life, store carbon dioxide and help control climate. They also provide humans with shelter, food and medicines vital for life.
To overcome this problem person has to get awareness regarding what deforestation is and what are the effects of it if we continue to practice it on the same scale. Actually, trees are the only source to filter the harmful gasses which are present in the atmosphere and can balance the harmful effects of those
Even if the reason of climate change may be the natural cycles, we humans are the major determinant to it. The huge amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is causing the climate change and this amount is rising day by day, as a result of our actions. Greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, generally absorb and emit the heat in the atmosphere to keep the Earth’s climate habitable. However, as we continue to burn fossil fuels, this habitable Earth’s temperature will blow up, and as a result, some species will die out due to various problems which are caused by climate change. According to EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the most obvious consequence of climate change is the rising sea levels, which will cause some seashore habitats to become unavailable to live to its species.
Scientists themselves are just beginning to understand the serious problems caused by deforestation. Deforestation occurs all over the world by all types of people. Peasant farmers even add to the problem because in most tropical countries the farmers are very poor only making between eight hundred and fifty four hundred dollars annually (NASA Facts). Therefore, they do not have enough money to buy what they need to live therefore they must farm to raise crops for food and to sell. In these poor countries the majority of people are peasant farmers this farming adds up to a great deal of deforestation. These farmers chop down a small area of trees for there plot to farm on and burn the tree trunks (NASA Facts). The combined number of farmers maintaining this process creates a great deal of clearing and burning of the land they need to cultivate, which results in land being treeless. Commercial logging is also another common form of deforestation. This commercial logging wipes out massive amounts of land sometimes deforesting several miles at...
People have been deforesting the Earth for thousands of years, primarily to clear land for crops or livestock. Although tropical forests are largely confined to developing countries, they aren’t just meeting local or national needs; economic globalization means that the needs and wants of the global population are bearing down on them as well. Direct causes of deforestation are agricultural expansion, wood extraction (e.g., logging or wood harvest for domestic fuel or charcoal), and infrastructure expansion such as road building and urbanization. Rarely is there a single direct cause for deforestation. Most often, multiple processes work simultaneously or sequentially to cause deforestation.
Deforestation is the elimination of existing trees from the earth; attributable factors include urbanization, logging, ranching, and farming and to some extent land speculation. Land speculation can be included as cleared land is more valuable than forested land. Deforestation, done in the name of progress, and the long-term, devastating effects of it, is killing our planet.