Sunday, January 29, 2012

Humanity’s Footprint


Alone with myself exploring the green canopy the call of nature makes me gaze in awe at her splendor. Despite the captivating beauty it renders trees provide a multitude of benefits to serve humanity and keep the environment balanced, it’s hard to imagine a life without trees.
Forests serve humanity and represent a valuable and usually irreplaceable habitat for wildlife. Since creation trees have provisioned us with two of life’s essentials, oxygen and food. As we progressed, they provided additional necessities such as shelter, medicine, and tools. In this era their value continues to increase as modern lifestyle expand.
Humans have practiced deforestation since ages; deforestation is defined as the large-scale removal of trees. It occurs all over the world, but mainly in tropical rainforest. It was in the mid- 19 century that forests began to be depleted at an aberrant rate. The most worrying factors today are the massive destruction of the world’s rainforest disturbing the biodiversity unfavorably.
However the issue is not just about losing a few plants and animals; humanity is affected much more, and if the current rate of deforestation continues, mankind will lose its own quality of life.The tropical forests diversity are perishing rapidly as humans clear the natural landscape to make room for farms and meadows, to harvest timber for construction and fuel, to build roads and countless other means. With all sort of destruction the most dramatic impact is a loss of habitat for millions of species, many of these animals go extinct, approximately we are losing 100 species a day. A fully functioning forest has a great capacity to regenerate but due to excessive depletion of tropical rain forests animal species necessary for forest regeneration is lost, so recovery of damaged forests are slowed down.
Today’s climate change is also one of the biggest long-term problems to global development. Forests have a vital role to play in the fight against global warming; forests absorb and store carbon in their trees and soil. The devastating combination of deforestation and burning of fossil fuels are releasing huge amounts of carbon dixiode into the atmosphere increasing the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. If the forests are been damaged at this rate and resolutions aren’t taken immediately to cut less trees as well as replanting those we have taken out the accelerating climate fluctuations are unpreventable.
Depletion of rain forest has fortunately received some significance unlike some environmental issues. Despite the opposition to the cutting down of forests, the problem continues mainly because most countries don’t have proper regulations and the exploitation of rain forests has been quite chaotic. If it continues at this pattern, we will be losing all tropical forests and facing the consequences.


- Zeyan Hashim