David Steinman
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 Costa Rica, Latin America's oldest and longest-running democracy, was in trouble, with one of the highest rates of deforestation in the world. It was a catastrophe in the making. The combination of international debts at high interest rates, rising unemployment, and national economic depression brought on by stifling international profiteering as one of America's preeminent banana republics led the Costa Rican government to embark on a campaign of rapid deforestation, for cheap timber and to raise cattle, as a means of raising foreign currency. It was a road to oblivion. |
Mark Lynas
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 It does not therefore require much imagination to understand why 'deforestation diesel' almost certainly has a worse impact on global warming than its conventional mineral counterpart: estimates have suggested that biodiesel based on palm oil feedstock can be ten times more carbon-intensive than fossil fuels.
If we leave biofuels and nuclear out of any prospective energy portfolio because of their obvious drawbacks, we can still get our seven wedges in other ways. We need to halve the distances people drive each year, and we need to double vehicle fuel economy. |
David R. Montgomery
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 Researchers also found evidence for accelerated soil erosion caused by extensive deforestation of sloping land in the Mayan lowlands. Where Mayan terraces remain intact, they hold three to four times more soil than lies on adjacent cultivated slopes. Development of erosion control methods allowed the Mayan heartland to support large populations but the expansion depended on intensive cultivation of erosion-prone slopes and sedimentation-prone wetlands. Eventually, Mayan civilization reached a point where its agricultural methods could no longer sustain its population. |
| Historians blame many culprits for the demise of once flourishing cultures: disease, deforestation, and climate change to name a few. While each of these factors played varying—and sometimes dominant—roles in different cases, historians and archaeologists rightly tend to dismiss single-bullet theories for the collapse of civilizations. Today's explanations invoke the interplay among economic, environmental, and cultural forces specific to particular regions and points in history. But any society's relationship to its land—how people treat the dirt beneath their feet—is fundamental, literally. |
| Of course, war, politics, deforestation, and climate change contributed to the societal collapses that punctuate human history. Yet why would so many unrelated civilizations like the Greeks, Romans, and Mayans all last about a thousand years?
Clearly, the reasons behind the development and decline of any particular civilization are complex. While environmental degradation alone did not trigger the outright collapse of these civilizations, the history of their dirt set the stage upon which economics, climate extremes, and war influenced their fate. |
| Often too few nutrients remain to support either crops or livestock within decades of deforestation. Nutrient-poor tropical soils illustrate the general rule that life depends on recycling past life.
Humans have not yet described all the species present in any natural soil. Yet soils and the biota that inhabit them provide clean drinking water, recycle dead materials into new life, facilitate the delivery of nutrients to plants, store carbon, and even remediate wastes and pollutants—as well as produce almost all of our food. |
| Lowdermilk was convinced that deforestation alone would not cause catastrophic erosion—shrubs and then trees simply grew back too fast. Instead, farmers cultivating steep slopes left the soil vulnerable to erosion during intense summer downpours. "Erosion is only indirectly related to the destruction of the former extensive forests, but is directly related to the cultivation of the slope lands for the production of food crops."
Rather than the axe, the plow had shaped the region's fate, as Lowdermilk observed. |
| The usual suspects of war, disease, drought, and deforestation have been proposed to explain the mystery.
Pollen sequences recovered from different depths in valley bottom sediments show little to no change in the vegetation community at Chaco Canyon for thousands of years—until the Pueblo people arrived. Plant remains preserved in crystallized packrat urine built up on the floor of caves show that the native vegetation was pinyon-juniper woodland, and that the local vegetation changed dtamatically during Pueblo occupation. |
Mark Lynas
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| Dry weather can also worsen deforestation, by killing off the remaining trees. Largely for this reason, Central America was identified in a 2006 study as one of the world's climate change 'hot spots', areas which are of the greatest concern on the planet.
It is hard to see how the tens of millions who currently live in Central America could survive for long in such marginal lands. A foretaste was given by a moderate drought in 2001, which triggered food shortages amongst an estimated 1.5 million people, leaving hundreds of thousands dependent on food aid for several months. |
| The human population encroaching on the forest has increased tenfold in the last half-century, and each new road the Brazilian government forges into pristine areas is quickly surrounded by new 'herringbone' patterns of deforestation. Slash-and-burn agriculture is also a serious threat, as half a million land-hungry peasants converge on Brazil's last great wilderness in search of a better living for themselves and their families. |
| Kilimanjaro's international celebrity status has also attracted the attention of climate change deniers, who suggest that deforestation on the mountain's lower slopes is more to blame for glacial retreat than global warming.
None of the contrarian rhetoric cuts any ice, so to speak, with Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University and a man who is deservedly one of America's most celebrated natural scientists. |
| Most of the mountains are classed by ecologists as pristine, isolated as they are from human impacts like fire and deforestation, which threaten biodiversity elsewhere.
But this very isolation has bred vulnerability. The shape i HKfcri 1J £, (j K £ £, s of the mountains, as a scattered archipelago of islands a thousand metres above a wider plain, ensures that most species can't migrate between them. Their flat tops mean that plants will be unable to move further uphill if climate change brings temperatures higher than they can tolerate. |
David Steinman
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| Of course, this could be accelerated, and may be 'short-circuited' by direct human deforestation," say the researchers in the Nature article.
Wangari Maathai wanted to create a sustainable supply of fuel wood for rural African women while halting soil erosion and other threatening forms of environmental degradation. |
| The combination of international debts at high interest rates, rising unemployment, and national economic depression brought on by stifling international profiteering as one of America's preeminent banana republics led the Costa Rican government to embark on a campaign of rapid deforestation, for cheap timber and to raise cattle, as a means of raising foreign currency. It was a road to oblivion. Costa Rica's climate was not conducive to raising catde, and the country was destroying its real assets for short-term gains to pay off the stifling international debt. |
Dr. Steven R. Gundry
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 This strategy is not about the ethics of eating animals, being the highest carnivore on the food chain, or deforestation of the Amazon to raise cattle. Rather, it is about finding the balance of animal protein to green plants in your diet that is right for you. You may transition to a near total vegephile existence in your Diet Evolution, or you may decide that all you are comfortable with is one meatless day a week. The choice is yours. |
Leslie Taylor, ND
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 Their use of the plants provides the bioprospector with the clues necessary to target specific species to research in the race for time before the species are lost to deforestation. More often, the race is defined as being the first pharmaceutical company to patent a new drug utilizing a newly discovered rainforest phytochemical—and, of course, to garner the profits.
Indigenous People, A Valuable Resource
Laboratory synthesis of new medicines is increasingly costly and not as fruitful as companies would like. |
James Howard Kunstler
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 The future deforestation of North America (and Europe) could be as rapid and dramatic as the extermination of the American bison in the decades after the Civil War.
Methane Hydrates
An immense amount of methane, natural gas, equal to at least twice the amount of all known fossil fuels on earth, is thought to be trapped in the ocean sediments as a gas hydrate. This is a kind of "ice" consisting of methane molecules, each surrounded by a "cage" of water molecules, stable only at low temperatures and extreme pressures typical of water depths below about a thousand feet. |
Amarjit S. Basra
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 The expanding international market along with the rapidly rising populations lead to ecological problems—not only because of overharvest-ing of medicinal plants for home use and export purposes but also because of deforestation by logging and conversion of backwoods to pasture and agriculture.3 This global development, together with increasingly restrictive conservation laws, will finally lead to considerable reduction of the still-dominant exploitation of natural resources in favor of cultivation. |
Leslie Taylor, ND
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| Scientists estimate that we are losing more than 137 species of plants and animals every single day because of rainforest deforestation.
Surprisingly, scientists have a better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than they have of how many species there are on Earth. Estimates vary from 2 million to 100 million species, with a best estimate of somewhere near 10 million; only 1.4 million of these species have actually been named. |
| If deforestation continues at current rates, scientists estimate nearly 80 to 90 percent of tropical rainforest ecosystems will be destroyed by the year 2020. This destruction is the main force driving a species extinction rate unmatched in 65 million years.
The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the "lungs of our planet" because it provides the essential service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen.
THE AMAZON RAINFOREST . . . THE LAST FRONTIER ON EARTH
If Amazonia were a country, it would be the ninth largest in the world. |
| Two drugs obtained from a rainforest plant known as the Madagascar periwinkle, now extinct in the wild due to deforestation of the Madagascar rainforest, have increased the chances of survival for children with leukemia from 20 percent to 80 percent. Think about it: eight out of ten children are now saved, rather than eight of ten children dying from leukemia. How many children have been spared and how many more will continue to be spared because of this single rainforest plant? |
Rainer W. Bussmann and Douglas Sharon
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 Climatic change and deforestation are threatening the mountain forest systems that are the source of many medicinal species. Most importantly, the high Andean ecosystems and sacred lagoons where many medicinally active species are found are in danger of being destroyed by large-scale mining activities [112, 113]. |
Gabriel Cousens, M.D.
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 The rapid planetary deforestation is decreasing the local supply of oxygen, air pollution combines with and ties up oxygen in the air, and the combustion of our automobiles and industries takes it from the local ground level atmosphere. Stress causes oxygen deficiency within the organism. For example, stress from toxic environmental substances in our air, water, and food uses oxygen for detoxification. Chemical pollutants, chlorine in water, and fumes from combustion of petrochemicals from our cars all require that we use our body supply of oxygen to protect us. |
Leslie Taylor, ND
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| Massive deforestation brings with it many ugly consequences—air and water pollution, soil erosion, malaria epidemics, the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the eviction and decimation of indigenous Indian tribes, and the loss of biodiversity through extinction of plants and animals. Fewer rainforests mean less rain, less oxygen for us to breathe, and an increased threat from global warming.
But who is really to blame? Consider what we industrialized Americans have done to our own homeland. |
Joseph E. Mario
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 Hemp farming could reduce deforestation 50% worldwide, and bring in revenues for small farmers.
Hemp stalk fibers are among the strongest and most flexible in the world even under harsh conditions, made into rope for towing icebergs, used in canvas; outlasts cotton, linen, and rayon in textiles; interwoven with linen in fine clothes; used in paper, medicines, oil, and for fuel. The world's first printed book (the Gutenburg Bible) and the Declaration of Independence, were printed on Hemp paper. |
James Howard Kunstler
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| The cooling of the Little Ice Age provoked the deforestation of England and the increased use of coal, and therefore led to inventions for improving coal extraction, namely the steam-powered pump for removing water from coal mines, which soon led to steam-powered railroads and the whole industrial explosion, in which more versatile oil and gas came to replace coal. The brief fossil fuel interval of the past two hundred years has accompanied another warming period, perhaps even stimulated it. |
Rainer W. Bussmann and Douglas Sharon
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| Despite the lukewarm response to the CBD by nation states, the global shift in awareness concerning tropical deforestation provided an opportunity for ethnobotanists to assert that everyone has an interest in preserving rainforests because they might contain compounds that could cure cancer, HIV-AIDS, and other diseases [86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91]. In addition, income derived from the marketing of traditional medicinal knowledge was seen as an
PLANTAS de LOS CUATRO VTFNTOS instrument to alleviate poverty and to finance conservation efforts [86,92,93,94]. |
Amarjit S. Basra
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| The large-scale collection of plants from natural stands, but also deforestation and erosion, resulted in the rapid depiction of wild populations, which is still going on. Most obviously general strategies such as appropriate information policies, environmental and resource management, and in situ/ex situ conservation programs are necessary. Domestication of intensely used wild-growing species is needed for a sustainable use as well as for the maintenance of biological diversity. |
Leslie Taylor, ND
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| RAINFORESTS, PHARMACY TO THE WORLD
It is estimated that nearly half of the world's approximate 10 million species of plants, animals, and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter-century due to rainforest deforestation. Edward O. Wilson estimates that we are losing 137 plant and animal species every single day. That's 50,000 species a year! Again, why should we in the United States be concerned about the destruction of distant tropical rainforests? |
Carlo Petrini
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 The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 32 percent since 1750, mainly because of the use of fossil fuels and changes in land use (such as deforestation). About 60 percent of this increase has occurred since 1959.
Such a level of interference in the balance of nature has significantly reduced biological diversity around the world: during the last hundred years, the coefficient of species extinction has increased a thousandfold compared with the average over the whole history of our planet. |
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