ndustrialized nations often respond to the issue of tropical deforestation with pedagogical or moral demands, and they treat the people of the tropics as a population that needs to be educated to the same level they themselves have reached so that those people will also want to protect the forests. 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
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