The burning rainforests

Last updated: March 17, 2008.

In the Eastern Amazon, the trees boil like kettles, releasing clouds of steam to the tropical atmosphere. One hundred years ago, a British explorer called Henry Bate caught over 700 different species of butterfly in a single hour's walk through Madagascar (by comparison, there are only 60 species in the whole of Britain). Nothing here is quite what it seems. Some of the plants will become medicines, latex, oils, vanilla, or spices. In Madagascar alone, the bushes yield 50 different types of coffee, including one that's naturally decaffeinated. You don't even recognize the trees for what they are—mahogany, ebony, and rosewood.

It's an amazing place, the Amazon rainforest.

And we're currently burning it to the ground at the rate of one acre per second.

Photo: Burning forest, by courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service.

An acre per second

You can see the rainforest burning from outer space. Last year, an area the size of Belgium was slashed and burned to the ground. If the destruction continues at its present rate of one acre per second, the entire forest will be destroyed in 50 years.

Surprisingly, only one or two trees in every acre have commercial value. The other trees are pulled down or damaged by heaving logging machines trying to extract the few valuable species.

Photo: Burning forest, by courtesy of US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Burning the cure for cancer?

It's not just naturalists who are interested in the Amazon. Roughly 40% of all the medicines prescribed in the US contain vital extracts from tropical plants, including cures for breast and cervical cancer, Hodgkin's disease, heart disease, ulcers, and dysentery. The US National Cancer Institute estimates 1400 rainforest plants could provide cancer treatments. One flower, the Rosy Periwinkle, provides treatments for Hodgkin's disease and leukaemia, as well as cancer. St Mary's Hospital in London is currently testing a rainforest plant as a cure for AIDS. All this and we've still only studied 1% of rainforest species for their medical potential.

Apart from vital medicines, the forest also gives us fruits, rubber, oils, spices, rattan, cornflakes, coffee, deoderant, ice-cream...

And timber.

My home... is your window frame

There are many reasons for the destruction of the forest, including farming, cattle ranching, and mining,. But by far the greatest threat comes from the timber trade.

The tropical forests produce the finest hardwood timber in the world and there is a huge demand from European countries. The wood is used in doors, window frames, and furniture—even in coffins and chopsticks.

Some countries have already destroyed most of their forests by logging. Nigeria now imports more timber than in exports. Other countries, like Thailand, have banned commercial logging,. So the timber trade is now turning its attention to Amazonia.

Fifty years—and it's gone

An acre every second. Eleven million trees a year, to say nothing of the lifeforms they support. More than half the rainforest has now been destroyed. At the current rate of destruction, the entire forest will be gone in fifty years' time. Satellite photos show that two great works of man are visible from outer space: the great wall of China and the burning rainforest.

Inferno verdo

In Brazil, they call it "inferno verdo"—the green hell. Here, trees are being slashed and burned for grazing land to help the farmers pay their debts. But this is ironic. Most rainforest nutrients are held in the trees themselves. When they're cut down and hauled away, all that's left is barren soil. In two to three years, it becomes completely exhausted. The farmers move on and chop down more trees.

Photo: Slashing and burning forest using a mechanical digger. US Fish and Wildlife Service.

For many decades, Brazilians could claim tax relief by clearing their forests. There was some regulation. The so-called "50% law" prevented a farmer from clearing more than half of his land. But there was nothing to stop him selling his land to a friend, buying it back for the same price, and clearing half again of the trees remaining. Now the Brazilian rainforest is just a few islands of trees in a burnt and devastated wasteland.

But the Brazilians alone cannot be blamed. The Japanese have bought, and are destroying, huge areas of South East Asian forest. And in the 1960s and 1970s, some Brazilian forests were felled for cattle ranching to supply the world hamburger trade.

Sit back and watch while they burn your mother?

No-one knows how all this will affect mother nature. It will certainly contribute to global warming, and some have predicted it could massively disrupt the world-wide climate.

Please note that this article was originally written in 1991 and some of the facts and statistics it contains are now out of date. Some day we may update it. In the meantime, we've left it here for your interest.