Rainforest Destruction and Climate Change
Spread over Africa, South America and Australasia, rainforests are the richest repositories of life forms on planet earth and its green lungs. One of our oldest ecosystems, rainforests are estimated to harbour 66% of all the species on earth! Today however many of the estimated 30-40 million species inhabiting these ecosystems are being lost, even before they can be catalogued, at a rate estimated at an astounding 50,000 species per year.
Not only are rainforests a vast repository of potential medicines they also play a vital role in producing oxygen and in maintaining global climatic patterns. The Amazon rainforests alone for example are responsible for 28% of the global oxygen turnover.
Rainforest Destruction
As our fragile planet travels on through space we are beginning to understand that everything that is alive is in interconnected harmony, and that damage to one part of our biosphere, for example Rainforest destruction, can have damaging ripple effects in other parts of our fragile ecosystem, including further deforestation and global warming.
Accelerating deforestation is particularly alarming. This is because the destruction of the last few remaining great forests is the result of our own deliberate effort, as opposed to climate change or some other convenient alibi. Setting aside the more obvious consequences of ozone depletion and global warming, rainforest destruction is especially worrying because it irrevocably extinguishes unique sub-biospheres that are unlikely to be rebuilt within the time frame left, according to some more sober global warming predictions.
Every deliberate act of rainforest destruction is a bizarre rehearsal for the global warming that will follow if the custodians of the earth cannot mend their ways. Deforestation destroys not just a piece of forest canopy, but also a portion of our fragile world. This is because the smaller trees and plants that the canopy previously sheltered cannot survive the direct rays of the sun, and so wither and die. By an ironic quirk of nature, young forest giants, too, do not survive without the initial protection of that lesser canopy. As a result an entire ecosystem vanishes forever, as do the human families, the mammals, the birds and the insects that once lived in harmony within it, leaving our planet a shamefully poorer place.