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.

The role of green house gases like methane and carbon di oxide in global warming and climate change is well documented. Automobiles, ocean liners and aircrafts have been roundly criticized for belching these gases that threaten to bring doomsday to the earth’s doorstep. What is little understood and appreciated is the fact that rainforest destruction releases more than 1.5 billion tones of green house gases (IPCC estimates), a fifth of the total global emissions and more than all the other sources mentioned above put together (Houghton, 2003; BBC report). Destruction of an acre of rainforest releases a thousand tons or more of carbon dioxide (http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/06/16/australia-forest-carbon.html). The importance of conserving rainforests thus becomes obvious.  Detractors have long hidden behind Odum’s view propounded in the 60’s that old rainforests do not help in trapping carbon dioxide. However a 2008 study has shown that these old forests continue to trap close to a billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. (Luyssaert et al., “Old-growth forests as global carbon sink,” Nature, 2008).

Rainforests have been at the receiving end of human greed and short sighted harvesting. Rampant rainforest destruction has shrunk rainforests to 50% of their earlier size, limiting them to a mere 6% of the earth’s surface. Estimates of the extent of rainforests lost vary from 17 million acres (United Nations estimate) to 50 million acres every year.  The WWF puts destruction rates at 25 to 50 acres every minute. To put in perspective, an area of tropical forest large enough to cover North Carolina is deforested each year. Today rainforests are being lost in Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Zaire, Guinea and many other countries. Some projections suggest that the remaining rainforests could be lost within the next 4 decades.

Aspirations of economic growth in third world countries and lifestyle choices in the developed world are the twin driving force behind deforestation in poorer Latin American, Asian and African countries. Livestock grazing to meet the increasing demand for beef is alone responsible for a large part of deforestation. Close to 55 square feet of rainforests are cleared for every pound of beef produced releasing 500 pounds of carbon di oxide in the process (The burger that ate a rain forest – London Times, Feb 26, 1989)! Forest land converted to pasture also contributes to global warming by increased emissions of methane by cattle.

In Brazil alone 24,000 square kilometres of rainforests are cleared every year (Santilli et al., Climatic Change; 2005). Besides pasture, rainforests have been cleared for timber – with concessions sold as cheap as $ 2 per acre, cropland, bio fuel cultivation, to feed iron mills with charcoal and paper factories with wood pulp. A single multinational pulp manufacturing project in Brazil consumes close to 2000 tons of pristine rainforest every day! International debt repayment obligations have also been instrumental in encouraging many nations to hawk their forest resources for hard cash in place of higher returns they could have realized in the longer term by sustainable forest management practices.

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.

While it has become popular to blame subsistence farmers for rainforest destruction, this is not the whole truth. Almost all the huge logs that were once forest giants, and much of the food that is grown on the new farmlands, end up in the homes and on the tables of the word’s developed nations, who therefore drive the process and must share the bulk of the blame.

While forests still cover about thirty percent of the earth’s surface, deforestation is proceeding at an alarming rate and it is estimated that the lungs that make the oxygen we breathe will vanish forever within a hundred years, unless something is done to reverse the rate of rainforest destruction. Every year a forest the size of Panama disappears. Every month as many trees as grow in Britain are taken down. Every day is a bad day for global warming, as an area of forest as large as one of our cities is destroyed.

When stripped naked of the rhetoric of human greed, responsibility for rainforest destruction lies with the developed nations who – after obliterating their own natural resources – now look elsewhere for stopgap solutions to their own selfish needs. Every act of deforestation accelerates global warming. Every year that passes is one year less before the last great forests begin to wither under a collapsing ozone layer.

Responsibility for change lies with individuals, for only they have the power to change the mood of great corporates, and the governments they feed.