r, no matter how gradual it may seem, it will catch up with us eventually. “The rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century will be about 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade; this is greater than that seen over the past ten thousand years” (Rosillo-Calle 130). Since trees absorb carbon dioxide, the loss of rain forests destroys one of the great natural sinks for this gas. With excessive amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the sun’s heat is trapped, preventing it from radiating back into space. This gradual warming of the atmosphere would cause polar ice caps to melt and flood coastlines. A temperature increase could also turn productive farmland into desert.The second major problem is timber cutting, or logging. An estimated twenty-five thousand square miles are being cut for logging each year. Annually, each American uses an average of forty-seven pounds of paper, which is made from wood, and two hundred and five board feet of lumber. In fact, author Daniel Janzen writes that, “In the United States, the timber industry cuts irreplaceable strands of old-growth forests, trees at least two hundred years old, from northern California to Washington State at an alarming rate” (84). Forty-nine percent of the timber harvest goes into saw logs for building and industry, while twenty-three percent into pulpwood, used for paperboard containers, book and writing paper, paper bags, toilet paper, and newsprint (85). To better illustrate these statistics, approximately one hundred and forty acres of pulpwood timber are required for one edition of a one hundred and twenty-eight page Sunday edition newspaper.Since every species depends on every other species, which is what the tropical rain forests are considered to be, if the tropical rain forests would be left undisturbed, every tree would support the next. Trees also depend on birds and animals to help them survive. As they scatte...
