Slash and Burn Affecting Biodiversity

 Besides it affecting the ground it also affects the air. With the great amount of smoke let off of a large fire it can pollute the air, with some runaway fires expanding as large as 400 x 600 km. As I just mentioned before, many people that do this do not know how to handle fire so you get “runaway fires”. There has been a surprising amount of runaway fires from this. These fires, obviously, can be much more harmful then most fires because, it has the same affects as it does on the small field but amplified. There are always other factors like; we may be trapping animals in these large fires but, what if we accidentally trap another human in the fire. We really need to be smart when it comes down to it. To not be reckless and really understand what we are doing and get it planned out so we do not hurt the environment or ourselves for that matter.

Then we have many people that rely on Slash and Burn for their food so that they may live. 3 to 5 million people practice Slash and Burn to get their food. Although there is this high number of people using it as a food source does that justify it? Perhaps the fact that there are so many people using it that just shows how it is destroying the environment even more? It comes down to a fight from ecologists and farmers. The ecologists would argue that Slash and Burn is killing special and unique species and destroying their homes. While farmers would argue they were not worried about the animals really just worried about their own survival.

In conclusion I would like to state my opinion on the whole matter. It sounds like to me perhaps the Slash and Burn practice is not all that bad. Sure it kills environments but really that’s just when it is not properly used. As people need it to survive, so they can eat, I can not see a realistic way we can stop it in a good manner. In the end it comes down to really it is a harmful to habitats and species. The decision is all with us to decide whether we need to figure out a way  to get the starving farmers food sufficiently so they do not need to slash and burn or perhaps for the farmers to come up with a more environment friendly practice. Whatever we choose, if we ever do, there most likely will still be people that use the slash and burn. Really we just need to control ourselves and be careful what we do.