ing for valuable resources plays a significant role. Since 1987, the year gold was discovered, as many as 40,000 gold miners have poured into the area of the Yanomami Indian lands. Mercury, which is used in the mining process, poisons the rivers, which in-turn affects downstream habitats and forest life. Not only do they affect the vegetation and wild life but this causes direct forest loss due to the clearing of land to establish mining projects. Roads will then be constructed through previously inaccessible land, opening up the forest. When they are finished the result is permanent, severe water, air and land pollution is the final product.Logging, which is included, accounts for significant tree loss per year. Commercial logging companies cut down mature trees that have been selected for their unusual and exotic timber. When these trees are selected large areas of rainforest are destroyed in order to remove only a few logs. The heavy machinery, which is used to penetrate the forests and build roads, causes extensive damage and produces large tracks where they have been. These tracks and the clearings left behind by loggers are sites of extreme soil disturbance, which begins to erode in heavy rain. This in-turn causes siltation of the forests, rivers and streams, making re-vegetation impossible for the next 2 to 3 hundred years. Siltation causes the water to become choked with mud and all life that depends on that clean water eventually suffocates. Most of this timber is then exported to the rich international markets of other foreign countries that will not be directly affected for the time being. There, it is sold for hundreds of times the price that is paid to the indigenous people whose forests has been plundered. After leaving these markets, the tropical timber will be used in construction of doors, window frames, crates, coffins, furniture, plywood sheets, chopsticks, household utensils and other ridiculous items.T...
