The Effect of Clearcut Deforestation on Physical and Chemical
Properties of Soils
Clearcut deforestation is done for a variety of different purposes. Frequently, sites owned by lumber companies are clearcut, replanted, fertilized, and maintained to keep a cyclic supply of lumber of uniform species, size, and age. Some lumber companies claim that in their tree harvesting practices can raise mature lumber in forty years (Wood, 1971), while most tree harvesting is on 70-100 year cycles. Deforested land can alternately be used as grazing or farming land. Both of these purposes involve a variety of different techniques depending on the company, location, and the geomorphology. In all of these cases, the clearcut site goes through a varying sequence of different processes that are supposed to prepare the site for the subsequent use. In general, clearcutting causes substantial erosion and nutrient depletion in the affected soil. The consequences of this erosion and nutrient mobilization are soil and land degradation.
The clearcutting industry adapts its techniques to the situation that they are dealing with. In all cases, clearcutting involves the creation of hauling roads for the heavy machinery that is used for sawing, transporting, and site preparation. The trees that are sold to the lumber company are then cut usually by drum-chopping or shearing. The timber is then attached by cables to a large wheeled machine called a "skidder" and dragged to a stack until it can be hauled to a mill to be sold or processed (Fritz, 1989). Finally, the site is prepared for whatever purpose it will be used afterward. If the site is going to be replanted with monoculture timber for future harvest, it is often cleared to strip the remaining...
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In summary, there is one thing that people need to survive in today’s society: money. Making more legal money means that people are less likely to turn to crime for survival, more people are spending more money, and people are living the way they deserve to. Minimum wage needs to be raised to meet the people’s needs.
Most people have heard of The Boston tea party. When American patriots dressed as Mohawk Indians boarded the British ships in the Boston harbor and dumped all of the tea into the ocean. But what most people fail to realize is the great importance behind this protest. To fully understand a topic of history one must first acknowledge the actions behind it. The French and Indian war, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Revenue Act, as well as the Tea Act are all important catalysts of the legendary Boston tea party. Which is why we will discuss these topics before examining the events of the Boston tea party.
During the late 1700’s almost up to the 1800’s, the U.S was going through a phase where colonists were dealing with taxation without representation by Parliament. This angered many colonists during this time. This caused many colonists to rebel against the British. One night in Massachusetts, rebellious colonists started to dump tea into the harbor in order to protest against taxation without representation. This event was called the Boston Tea Party. Parliament found out about the Boston Tea Party. As a response to the Boston Tea Party, Parliament passed the Intolerable Acts.
The minimum wage must be raised because the cost of living has gone up considerably. Education is essential if one wishes to work, and the cost of education has increased drastically in the past twenty years. Companies should be requied to pay workers what they deserve, and that is more than minimum wage is now. With our new technology and the technology in the future work is harder and more complicated. A minimum wage increase would raise the wages of many workers and increase benefits to those disadvantaged workers.
Imagine running three football fields with your eyes closed. Now imagine driving 75 miles per hour on the interstate and closing your eyes for the length of approximately three football fields, or 4.6 seconds. This is effectively what happens when people text and drive. Texting and driving is a serious problem in the US and is resulting in too many deaths and accidents.
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Land clearing includes strict laws throughout Australia, with variation across states (Stone, A. 2010). A common technique, crushing light scrub and heavy trees is chaining, using a heavy chain up to 50 centimetres in diameter. The chain linked between two tractors is kept close to the ground, pulling trees out thoroughly with the roots, flattening areas. It is required that tractors work a maximum of 30 meters apart...
Texting while driving is a widespread epidemic in the United States that has unfavorable effects on our society.“Driving while texting is the standard wording used for traffic violations” (Bernstein). It causes many people to be distracted which can lead to accidents. “Eighty-nine percent of people own a cell phone” (Gardner). That is a plethora of people that are at risk of texting while driving. Also, texting has increased by ten times in three years(Bernstein). “The risk of a crash for those who are texting is twenty-three point two times greater than those who are not” (Gardner).Driving drunk only makes a person seven times more likely to be in a crash (Bernstein). This means texting while driving is three times more dangerous than driving intoxicated. One in five drivers admits to texting while driving(Gardner). This shows that that texting while driving is a widespread epidemic. When a survey asked teenagers whether they text and drive,“seventy five percent of teens admitted to texting while driving” (7).Distracted driving causes seventy-eight percent of car crashes(Bernstein). “No distraction causes as high of a risk of an accident as texting while driving” (Gardner). Also with these statistics, it is not hard to understand why accidents in teenagers that are driving have risen. The Bluetooth capability in cars gives a driver a hands-free way to talk on the phone, but is still not completely safe (8). Also, only 1 out of 3 US cars sold in 2009 had this feature. New systems are being developed that will use Bluetooth as well a global positioning technology to allow parents to monitor cell phone use and texting while driving (10).
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.
Though deforestation has increased at an alarming rate throughout the past fifty years, deforestation has been performed during the course of history. According to the World Resources Institute, a majority of the world’s enduring naturally occurring forests are found in Alaska, Canada, Russia and the Northwestern Amazon. Research has demonstrated forests are more likely to be destroyed and repurposed where economic revenues tied to agriculture and pasture are prominent, typically attributed to advantageous weather conditions, or lower expenses of demolishing the forest and delivering merchandises to the global
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...
The single biggest direct cause of tropical deforestation is conversion to cropland and pasture, mostly for subsistence, which is growing crops or raising livestock to meet daily needs. The conversion to agricultural land usually results from multiple direct factors. For example, countries build roads into remote areas to improve overland transportation of goods. The road development itself causes a limited amount of deforestation. But roads also provide entry to previously inaccessible—and often unclaimed—land. Logging, both legal and illegal, often follows road expansion (and in some cases is the reason for the road expansion). When loggers have harvested an area’s valuable timber, they move on. The roads and the logged areas become a magnet for settlers—farmers and ranchers who slash and burn the remaining forest for cropland or cattle pasture, completing the deforestation chain that began with road building. In other cases, forests that have been degraded by logging become fire-prone and are eventually deforested by repeated accidental fires from adjacent farms or pastures.
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.
Timber and especially hardwoods like mahogany and ebony are being felled at an alarming rate to satisfy the needs of the swiftly developing world. Another problem for the forest areas of the world is the type of agriculture used by some peasant farmers known as "slash & burn". This method of farming involves the burning of trees to add to the initial supply of nutrients in the soil. Over time this supply slowly wares down and so the farmer once again moves onto another plot of trees to slash and burn.