1. What are the major reasons for the destruction of the rainforests and what people's lives their are hurt by this?
2. What can students, of all ages, do to help save the rainforest?
Rain forests are complex ecosystems that are essentially self-sufficient when
healthy. However, they are not easily regenerated once removed from
an area. A healthy rain forest will, for instance, thrive by
recycling most of the
nutrients needed for plant growth between living plants, animals and
decaying organic matter without outside intervention; however,
it needs a large variety of organisms to do this.
Once a parcel is deforested, it is unlikely that it will regrow to
resemble its past condition without massive human intervention
(which rarely occurs). In its place will likely grow a low-species-
diversity assemblage of organisms that will eventually deplete the landscape of
nutrients and therefore not be truly sustainable.
Thus, rainforest loss is typically permanent.
The global coverage by rain forests is dimished each year by human
activities in order to support things such as agriculture, mineral
resource exploitation, the hardwood lumber industry and urbanization.
There are a number of physical, biological and ascethic reasons
to preserve rain forests. When not preserved, the effects on people
can be both local and global in scope. A few are summarized below:
Rain forests exist in regions that are very wet. Both tropical
and temperate climate examples can be found. A primary useful
attribute of rain forests is that they control the rate of
erosion in their watersheds.
These forests disperse the energy of falling heavy rain and further
reinforce the soil through their root system. Without such forests,
fully-formed top soils would not be generated and instead, weathered
and/or fresh rock would appear on the surface. Without soils,
the large arrays of organisms that require it to live would not exist,
nor would the fundamental chemical processes that occur in a healthy
ecosystem take place. In addition, right after deforetation and
possibly continuing for many decades hence, massive transport of
soil and sediment particles occurs in waterways in the area, thus impacting
aquatic ecosystems as well. Soil particles can contain high amounts of
chemically-reactive substances and plant fertilizer ("nutrient") compounds;
dispersing them into the environment in quick pulses can overwhelm an
aqautic environment, causing such problems as "eutrophication" (the biological
diminishment of dissolved oxygen below levels acceptable to most respiring
organisms). Additionally, murky water allows less light to penetrate it
(diminishing algal and other plant productivity), it traps heat and
allows the waters to become much warmer than clear ones (affecting species
makeup and the amount of biologically-important dissolved gasses it can hold),
and affects the chemical composition of the waters (through adsorption
and particle dissolution reactions).
Rain forests contribute to biologically-important gasses in the Earth's atmosphere: they produce a large percentage of the available O2 on the
planet via photosynthesis (although the main source of oxygen on
Earth is from phytoplankton in the oceans). When the forests are
destroyed, the rate at which CO2 can be drawn from the atmosphere is
diminished. CO2 is a "greenhouse" gas that helps regulate the
temperature of our atmosphere. This gas is a biproduct of all
respiring organisms, as well as a biproduct of the combustion of organic
matter, such as fossil fuels. If CO2 builds up in the atmosphere,
the average temperature on the surface of the Earth can increase,
affecting most aspects of human life.
As rain forest is cleared, what grows in its place is typically
opportunistic species such as grasses. These are not sufficient to
keep the area from eroding or to allow the regeneration of a biologically-
diverse ecosystem in the area. Because barren rock or soil reflects
a great deal more incident sunlight than does a forested area, the local
"heat" budget for a region can be drastically changed by deforestation,
thus affecting the local climate.
Also, rain forests, particularly tropical ones, support a much greater
number of species per unit area than other biomes on Earth. This
species diversity is required for a healthy ecosystem. When we
remove a large enough number of species from the species "web" of
a complex ecosystem such as this, it can no longer fend off
natural disasters such as disease or drought. Thus, even removing
only part of a rain forest can cause the remaining forest
to be non-sustainable or dramatically altered.
Additionally,
many plants are known to produce chemicals ("natural products") with
enormous potential for a large range of uses (controlling diseases,
manufacturing, etc..). Because there is a large species diversity
in tropical rain forests and because many are remote and largely
uncharted, it stands to reason that as new species go extinct each day,
we are loosing important chemical producing organisms we haven't
even discovered yet. Often times, even after a plant has been
found to produce a chemical that is useful to humans, we must continue
to rely on the plant to produce it for our use because artificial
systhesis of the same material is expensive or otherwise impractical.
A final reason to preserve rain forests is ascethic: These are
truly beautiful regions of the planet, exploding with colors and
aromas and exotic sounds. Although little lowland rain forest survives
in Hawaii, most of our mountainous regions contain pristine or semi
pristine rain forest. If you are ever in Hawaii or some other tropical
locale, take a moment to head into the forest.
You won't be disappointed
Dr. Ken Rubin, Assistant Professor
Department of Geology and Geophysics
University of Hawaii, Honolulu HI 96822
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