destructive. The forest has the ability to replenish itself if given the proper time to. The problem is that as soon as the new trees reach a suitable size they are cut again. Some areas of the rain forest have been cleared three times in thirty years. Logging has grown extensively, and there is a spread of it into the last intact forests. One of these is the Amazon River Basin. The Basin is being logged from every side.There use to be a selective process into which trees could be cut and which were to be saved, but now there is barely any selective process at all. “Excellent forestry has four characteristics: It consists of limiting the cutting of timber to that which can be removed annually in perpetuity. It consists of growing timber on long rotations, generally from one to two hundred years. It consists of practicing a selection system of cutting wherever this is consistent with the biological requirements of the species. Finally, it consists of taking extreme precautions to protect the soil.”(Mason 275) The number of trees being able to cut down has more than doubled in the past ten years. The amount of central and west rain forests that have vanished are beyond belief. Uneconomical logging methods and population explosions have taken its toll on the forests. South American logging companies are a serious threat to the forests. They are extremely destructive because they cut a large variety of tree species and go for clear felling, which is the total clearing of an area. They are very secretive so they are hard to find and track down. There are areas of logging trucks, dirt roads, boomtowns, and sawmills that work day and night non-stop. Improvements are being made with specialized machinery and technical improvements such as sawmills extracting more wood from one log than in the past.Poaching is the second most destructive activity done to the rainforest. The numbers of animals slaughtered is horren...
