reporter of USA Today, “Planet Earth once contained approximately 6,750,000 square miles of closed canopy rain forest” (74). Unfortunately, each year another two percent of this priceless treasure is lost. At these present rates of destruction, there will be only few small patches of tropical forests remaining beyond the year 2050.There are a variety of factors why we are losing so much of our world’s rain forests, yet the principle reason is also the simplest. Ignorance of people’s basic ambitions to work the forest’s soil and live off land is this reason. To illustrate this, author Peter Farb states that, “In the past forty years, half of the world’s valuable tropical rain forests have been cleared away” (116). Culprits, such as cattle ranchers, multinational corporations, and even world governments are being held responsible for such actions. Due to these and many others, an area the size of Pennsylvania is deforested each year, being eliminated at a rate of fifty to one hundred acres every minute.The first major problem is burning of the land areas. This slash and burn agriculture occurs when the trees are cut down by farmers and then burned where they lie. The general problem here is that most of the useful nutrients are in the living organisms, the trees, and not in the topsoil. When a forest is cut down and burned, there is a fine layer of ash which crops can grow in for just a few years. However, once the crops absorb all of the nutrients, the land becomes worthless and remains a wasteland. Unless the farmer can afford to purchase commercial fertilizer, which is very unlikely, he/she is now forced to move along and repeat this same process.The burning of the rain forests also contributes to the greenhouse effect. It is the gradual warming of our atmosphere due to the reradiate greenhouse gases (water vapor and carbon dioxide) that get trapped in our atmosphere. Howeve...
