The destruction of tropical forests has long been a source of alarm to professional ecologists and environmental activists, and increasingly it has become a matter of public concern in Western industrial nations. Citizens of industrialized nations often respond to the issue of tropical deforestation as if they are teaching backward people how to cope with their ecosystem. One reason for this attitude is the perception that deforestation is the result of innumerable individual decisions that are rational on a small scale (e.g., subsistence farming, ranching, or lumbering for profit) but that have consequences that are irrational on the large scale (e.g., alteration of hydrological patterns, effects on global climate, or reduction of biodiversity). The basic problem of tropical deforestation is seen in the fact that habitat destruction in the tropical rain forests is proceeding at an average annual rate of 100,000 200,000 square kilometers, an area the size of England. Precisely what is disappearing is a matter of argument, and that is part of the problem. The tropics contain a disproportionate share of the world's species of plants and animals, many of them endemic to tiny habitats. Above and beyond the species they comprise, tropical forest habitats offer several classes of local and global values: hydrological, in preventing soil erosion and downstream siltation, and climatological, in maintaining local precipitation and the atmospheric balance of gases.
Tropical forests are disappearing at the rate of tens of thousands of square miles per year and that this deforestation is laying waste to a valuable natural resource throughout much of the developing world and is bringing countless plant and animal species to extinction. It may well have significant effects on world climate. This destruction is being brought about by inefficient commercial logging operations and the conversion of forested areas to cattle ranching and ag...