Saving Our Tropical Rainforests

Now, close your eyes for a few seconds. Do your eyes feel better and get less tired? You may feel very comfortable as you can take a rest for few seconds. In the meantime, however, immeasurable quantities of wildlife are losing their homes or even their lives because of deforestation. After hearing the shocking rate of deforestation, do you still have the mood to take a rest?

The Amazon Basin in South America is the largest rainforest in the world which provides habitats for numerous animals and plants. Many natural resources are also available within the rainforest areas. Because of the attractive and valuable resources, people begin to earn a living by exploiting the rainforest. In recent years, the rate of deforestation keeps rising sharply (100,000 sq. km/year), which has led to great destruction to the ecological system in the rainforest areas. In the Amazon Basin, deforestation is threatening the Earth’s climatic system in the coming decades.

Generally speaking, those people who continuously carry out deforestation are very selfish. They care nothing about the consequences of deforestation before taking actions. Some of them may argue that they have no choice but to carry out deforestation because they are extremely poor. Worse still, the local governments in the rainforest countries (eg. the Brazilian government) support the exploitation of the tropical rainforest (TRF). Foreign countries, especially those temperate industrialized countries like Japan and the US, to name but a few, are allowed to exploit the resources by the countries in TRF. However, they should be reminded that conservation of the environment is of great importance as well.

In fact, people who practice deforestation are cruel to the animals living in rainforest as well. Every time, deforestation kills the wildlife living there. Even though some of them may be lucky enough that they can survive, they can hardly find another home. And since the environment in the rainforest is seriously damaged, it takes a long time for animals to adapt to the new environment. Imagine that you were one of the animals living in the rainforest and your home is greatly damaged, what do you feel? As human beings, the cleverest animal in the world, we act as the leaders of the world and so we all have the responsibility to look after other species. Therefore, I am disappointed to see that human activities like deforestation are now threatening other species in the world.

It seems that deforestation does not affect us as long as we are not living in TRF. Nevertheless, many of our food and medicines, in fact, come from the rainforests. If rainforests keep vanishing, there may be a shortage of a particular resource. Basically, as a citizen, we can also do something to check deforestation. The easiest way is to use papers appropriately. Nowadays, seldom do people treasure papers. For instance, they use only one side of them. In addition, many people often misunderstand that they cannot help much and so they do not show much concerns on problems like deforestation.

The god provides us with the best resources we need and a wonderful environment for us to live in. All the damages we have made to the natural environment are irreversible. Natural hazards like flooding and droughts are warning from the Earth. So, we cannot turn a blind eye to this malady and prompt actions must be taken to preserve our Earth before it is too late.