Deforestation

A global ecological disaster is a very real possibility in light of the rate at which forests are being devastated and biological species wiped out. Deforestation, or the deliberate removal of trees, is one of the most longstanding and significant ways in which man has changed the environment. It is believed that humans have been destroying the environment since the Mesolithic and Neolithic times. Because man has found so many uses for trees, they are being used faster than they can replace themselves (Goudie, 1986). Although trees are renewable resources, they are being cut down faster than nature can replace them. Forests are also cleared for farming and grazing of livestock. Much of the Midwestern United States has been cleared for livestock as well as farmland. Homes and office buildings have replaced trees along hillsides. Trees and the products of trees have also been used as a source of energy.

Although trees are being cut down and forests are being turned into fields and high rise buildings, is this actually having a detrimental effect? What will the world be like without trees? It has been proven that biological diversity, as well as the environment as a whole, have been negatively affected by deforestation. The problem keeps getting worse; it cannot go away until people take on the responsibility to rectify this worsening problem.

One major concern of biologists is that the loss of forests is causing a mass ex

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rd world nations to over exploit their natural resources without the creation of stable alternatives (Allen). For example, much of the rain forests in Central America have been turned into cattle ranches. Since this meat is produced much more cheaply than in the United States, much of it is imported into the country and turned into assorted meat products. But what is that hamburger really costing the environment in the long run? It has been determined that we lose about half a ton of forest for every hamburger produced in a Central American forest. Each Central American forest hamburger represents about 55 square feet of forest (Uhl, 1987). Two billion years ago green plants mastered the chemistry of converting sunlight and chemicals into complex molecules. One spillover of this process was surplus oxygen, released into the atmosphere during photosynthesis. At first this process was considered to be the "worst atmospheric pollution incident that this planet has known," according to British scientist James E. Lovelock (Kittredge, 1978). At the time, oxygen was deadly to many of the organisms. It was not until 400 million years ago that air-breathing amphibians evolved and 200 million years ago when warm-blooded mammals
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1832
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)