Explain the impact of logging on the indigenous people of any rainforest. Use the concept of ‘Interconnection’
Answers
Introduction
The start of the Millennium marks the entry of our species into the biological century'. We now have an unprecedented ability to understand biosphere, and put its resource to good use. Yet we are failing miserably to preserve, and use sustainably the diversity of plant and animal species- a diversity of plant and animals species that is bearing lost at unprecedented and accelerating rates in many parts of the world. Forest ecosystems are no exception. We know that more than 20 million hectares of forest we lost in 1998, but such statistics don't tell us how many other forest were severely degraded that year. Destructive pratices like logging contribute to the decline of forest.
Tropical rainforest eradication is often a three staff process. Logging companies carve out concessions and bulldoze access roads into pristine rainforest to extract timber. Peasant families follow the roads into the jungle in a desperate search for land and livelihood they clear the forest to grow subsistence crops, cutting down all the trees and burning them and using the ashes as fertilizer. After just three or four harvest, inset plagues, weeds and soil impoverishment force to move on and repeat the cycle in undisturbed areas.
Forest: Source of life:
The world depends largely in forest either directly or indirectly. Losing forest completely will affect climates, undermine future economic development and threaten social and political stability of countries. Below are some environmental benefits of forest.
Environmental benefits of forest.
(1) Soil stabilization;
(2) Watershed protection
(3) Carbon sequestration
(4) Research & pharmaceutical
(5) Maintenance of water Quality:
(6) Maintenance of Climatic stability:
(7) Flood Control
Results: Impact of Logging Forest
Loss of Biodiversity:
The most important conservation impact of logging forest is the attendant loss of biological and genetic diversity. It is quite clear, felling substantial areas of forest will result in loss of species. The detrimental effect of logging, which has been underestimated, for sometime has become, according to most studies, concentrated on the larger and more obvious species, such as mammals, birds and flowering plants. Although these groups are likely to suffer decline after felling, effects are often partial and confusing with certain species showing at least short term increase. This has blunted "the conservationist" response to forest loss for many years. The impact on invertebrates, lower plants and microscopic life forms is far more significant but has generally still not been assessed and often goes unrecognized.
Plants and animals vanish with the forest. A typical 1000-hectares patch of tropical moist forest contains as many as 1,500 species of flowering plants, up to 750 species of trees, 400 birds species, 150 kinds of butterflies, 100 different types of reptile and 60 species of amphibians, the insects are too numerous to count.
Mature tropical forest cover only about 7 percent (%) of the earth's surface, but harbor perhaps half of all its species, most of them as yet under covered. Clearing them may drive a million or more species extinction in the 21st century. The loss of even one species diminished the whole of humanity, for it is a storehouse of genetic resources. All civilization have been built in the diversity, since crops and investment were first developed from the wild, and we are still dependent on it for food, medicines and industrial raw materials. Crop breeders increasingly rely on wild strains to improve domesticated varieties and safeguard them against diseases a wild coffee from Ethiopia's fast disappearing forest, for example was used to save plantation through Latin America from devastation and several national economies from disaster. Half of all the medicine presented world wide is originally described from wild products, and the United States National Cancer Institute has identified more than 2000 tropical rainforest plants with potential to fight cancer. Miracle wait in the rainforest to be discovered even for the possible cure for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (Aids). Yet they are being destroyed on a daily basis.
References
1. Birdlife International, 1998. Threatened birds of the wood, Lynx editions, Spain 851pg.
2. Diamond A.W., and T.E. Lovejoy, 1985. Conservation of tropical birds, International Council for Bird Preservation (Technical publication No.4), P18p.
4. Nigel Dudley, 1998. Forest in trouble, World Wide Fund Publication, Switzerland, 260pg
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