Friday, October 19, 2012

Blog 8: Deforestation


Forest destruction has played a major role in our world for the last few decades in hopes that jobs would be given to people to boost our economy. By destroying forests, we have taken away the habitats of animals, but also given jobs to men and women, as well as facilities that could house thousands of jobs for workers. Forest destruction has, in some cases, possibly been a help, but now, it’s becoming too much. I Madagascar alone, more than 80 percent of their palms are being threatened with extinction because of forest-cutting for agriculture and mining. What many forest destruction companies don’t know is: the destruction of these forests are what have been giving us a large amount of weather related catastrophes in the world. According to the New York Times, there have been 4 in Asia, 2.5 in Africa, 2 in Europe, 1.5 in South America, and then we had Hurricane Katrina, one of the deadliest events in the world so far. It has cost us over 40 billion dollars in just claims alone! These aren’t problems that just come up; they are caused by chain reactions. After this, we had the Fukushima disaster in Japan, that eventually lead us to longer expansions of nuclear sectors. This has caused us $12.75 billion dollars that is continuing to go up. Where are these plants going to go? In what are now our forests. We have nations fighting one another on forest rights, animal rights, and just about everything else. In India, the Supreme Court passed a law to only allow 20 percent of any habitats to be open to humans because the habitats are dwindling down into nothing. Once these habitats are going, the only thing we’ll have is increased Weather Disasters and Catastrophes like Katrina that will only pull our Economy into further disposition and decline.
          This brings me back to the point in Madagascar alone. The palms that are becoming extinct have been a part of their biodiversity for years. These palms provide resources to some of Madagascar’s poorest communities providing house construction, and food. These losses of habitat have been putting major strain on Madagascar as a whole.
          We then have the issue with high temperatures and natural disasters that are threatening our world as a whole. Katrina was just the beginning of the catastrophes that will continue to happen if we keep cutting our forests down to build more power plants or factories for workers. Disasters have already driven the world’s economy down to an outstanding 510 billion dollar loss; this has been one of the highest we’ve ever had. Yet we still continue to wonder why our economy is dwindling down into nothing and there are poor nations and struggling countries. Our world revolves off of chain reactions and we have to stop it before it gets any worse.

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