Deforestation is clearing the forests on earth on a massive
scale, usually resulting in damage to land quality. As stated in the article,
forests are covering about 30% or earths land, and only ¼ of earth has land
that you can stand on, so 30% of ¼ s not a lot. Currently, at the rate we are
deforesting, earth will run out of forests in 100 years. Normally forests are
cut down for money, for families to have homes, but mainly the reason is
agriculture. Farmers cut down forests so they can have more area to plant on,
or to let their livestock graze. Small farmers use a technique called “slash
and burn”, where they cut down an area of forest and then burning it.in order
to get paper products and wood, logging operations must be established, but
they cut countless amounts of trees annually, and often, illegally. Also, not
all deforestation is intentional; sometimes it is caused by both humans and
nature from wildfires to overgrazing. Deforestation has many negative effects
including the loss of habitat for millions of species, since 70% of earth’s
plants and animals rely on forests for a permanent home. Another effect is
climate change, the soil in a forest is moist but if you take the forest away,
it will quickly dry out. The fastest way to stop deforestation would be to
simply stop cutting down trees, but that’s not going to happen, instead, as
suggested by the National Geographic, we could manage forest resources by
eliminating clear-cutting to make sure forests stay intact.
I think that this is a very important topic since forests
are like a filter keeping out greenhouse gasses just like a filter keeps junk
out of you water. Not only that but forests also contain many keystone species,
or we can assume it does because of its large biodiversity. This issue can also
bring in job opportunity, such as becoming a scientist who would try to figure
out ways to use other cheaper organic materials that you can use to make, say,
paper out of, and by cheaper I mean easy to produce and quick to grow. That would
act as an alternative to paper production and save the amount of trees as well
as get people jobs.
Would it be a good idea to start a program that focuses on
making cheaper alternatives for paper, as suggested in the paragraph above?
Should governments begin to regulate births and set a
maximum amount of people aloud to be born annually per year or another similar system
to help stop the demand for wood for housing projects?
Should there be more jobs dedicated to more efficiently
recycling wood so that it may be used again for the same purposes?
I think that this is a very important topic that can affect many organisms. Also some products like syrup comes from trees which are in the forests. So it is not like the people are not going to be affected. Also with the forests gone then the tree level will go down which will make the oxygen in the air go down.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think we can do to stop deforestation?
Do you agree with Natural Geographic's idea to help stop deforestation?
What do you think is more important the drinking water situation or the deforestation situation?
Hello, I'm Zach Reilly and my 9th grade science class is writing blogs about environmental issues in the world. Since your article was used, we would greatly appreciate if you could review and comment on the summary and question formulated from your article.
ReplyDeleteHere is the link to the article:
http://sciencepeoplez.blogspot.com/2012/12/this-arcticle-posted-by-national.html
I believe that the National Geographic Society are the perfect people to ask because they are a very reputable source worldwide. They accumulate so much information that their website has become almost a database of approved, highly researched topics such as deforestation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8nXltMZYtM
ReplyDeleteI thought this would be a great eye opener for deforestation because it explains the real impact of it and what will happen after we cut down all the trees. It also explains the amount of water a tree can hold, and how much a tree uses in its lifetime. It is a very intriuging video to watch about how much impact you have on the enviornment surrounding this one tree and what it can cause.
Would it be a good idea to start a program that focuses on cheaper alternatives for paper, as suggested in the article above?
ReplyDeleteI think this would be a good idea because we rely so heavily on trees for paper, and if we had an alternate source, it would drastically cut down the deforestation. With this, many more forests will be still standing, and whole forests will be left alone because we no longer need to cut them down.
Should governments begin to regulate births and set a maximum amount of people aloud to be born annually per year or another similar system to help stop the demand for wood for housing projects?
I do not think that the government should regulate births because there a many different ways we can go through with this. Regulating births will still have all the people on the planet now chopping down large areas, and we can keep growing but have these people only chop down small amounts to be more efficient.