DEFORESTATION RELEVANCE
Answers
We incorporated published material on boreal and tropical deforestation and local data taken from forests surrounding Oxford into the larger issues of human induced disturbance on forest ecosystems. Using “The Gaia Principle” and the “Peter Pan Principle,” we plan to explore the links of deforestation to the anthropogenic positive feedbacks mechanisms of global warming.
Perhaps the Earth and all its living systems are not as fragile as we would like to think. Life on the Earth has existed for about 3 billion years and humans have been around for 1 million of these years, which is a very small fraction of time in geologic history. There have also been many threats to the existence of life on Earth other than human induced; the hypothesized Snowball Earth, the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, and several glaciations, which have all caused the extinction of a large percentage of the living creatures each time.
James Lovelock hypothesizes that for life to continue and evolve after every extinction and threaten the natural systems of which life depend on, there must have been some outside regulating system (which he calls Gaia) that have kept conditions on the Earth suitable to life for most of its history. He shows that if the Earth did not have a regulating system, the atmosphere would be mostly dominated by CO2 and not nitrogen and oxygen. What is more important is that Lovelock shows us that the concentration of gases in the atmosphere and temperatures on the Earth have not fluctuated a whole lot in 3 billion years.
Our increased population and our mass consumption of natural resources has only occurred for the last 100 years of all of Earth’s history. Humans have caused an increase in the total CO2 content of the atmosphere in the last one hundred years; in fact we have put over 100 ppm more carbon in the atmosphere from our industrial practices of burning fossil fuels and cutting down forests. At no other period of history has atmospheric composition been changed by one single species, although bacteria might have changed the composition of the atmosphere billions of years ago but, not at the rate in which humans have.
Perhaps we are now witnessing the Earth as a system adapting to this change of increased carbon and an increase in average annual global temperature. Research has shown that some plants are increasing the rate of photosynthesis (taking in more carbon from the atmosphere) and are growing more densely. Other research is showing that plants are distributing themselves towards the poles due to increases in average annual temperature of carbon induced global climate change. Perhaps the Earth as a system, Gaia, has its own way of adapting to change, but the question we need to ask is whether we will have our own way of adapting to these changes as a species.
When we add more carbon into the atmosphere in years to come from the increased annual rate of deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels (by the way, current estimates indicate we only have 50 years left of petroleum in reserves), we may be able to breathe the same air, but will we be able to adapt to a changed global habitat? The Earth’s biosphere may change to the point where we may not be able to grow the same crops as we did before and grow them in the same places on the Earth that we have always done before. We may not have the same living resources that we do have now, such as rainforests and certain animals that we depend on for food; they may become extinct. What will we do if Gaia can not regulate the systems of the biosphere at a fast enough rate to meet the conditions for our survival, conditions of which we’ve been accustomed to for our entire existence as a species?
Answer:
Deforestation not only removes vegetation that is important for removing carbon dioxide from the air, but the act of clearing the forests also produces greenhouse gas emissions. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says that deforestation is the second-leading cause of climate change.