Why Green (Number Two in a Series)
6 February 2008One of the lessons I learned as a child was to not be only a “taker,” that a moral person finds ways to “give back.” To some, of course, that is a fairly Pollyanna point of view, but the best teacher has always been life, and what we see all around us does tend to support that point of view.
The Amazon River is half a world and four time zones away from San Diego. What difference does it make if someone cuts down a lot of the trees along that river? And, to be honest, for a long time it probably didn’t matter very much. The problem, though, is that we have kept on cutting down those trees, and now after several centuries of cutting down the trees in the Amazon and just about every other place trees grow, we are beginning to see that what we are doing may not be the wisest course for us to be taking.
I don’t want to use a lot of statistics in this, but there are some numbers that are worth noting in this discussion. First, tropical rainforests once occupied some fourteen percent of the Earth’s land surface. That figure is now down to less than six per cent of the land surface of the earth, but despite its increasingly shrinking footprint, rainforests probably sustain more than half of the biological species on the planet.
So, who cares, really? It’s too far away to make a difference. But the plain fact of the matter is that it does matter. Consider this: trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, which is, of course, essential to life. And the flip side of that is that by turning carbon dioxide into clean air, the rainforests help deter the greenhouse effect, because the trees of the rainforest store carbon dioxide in their roots, stems, branches, and leaves.
That’s why some have come to describe the Amazon Rainforest as the “Lungs of our Planet.” More than twenty percent of the world’s oxygen supply is produced in the Amazon Rainforest. What do you suppose is going to happen when the last tree is cut down? And finally, this number, the most chilling one of all: it is estimated that at our present rate of deforestation that rainforests will be gone in forty years!
So, what does one person do about all that? He does whatever he can do.
Joseph
NEXT: “First Do No Harm”
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