AmazonNov 27, 2011
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Our home in the Amazon
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| Just some information .... I ran out of original thoughts: Less than 5% of the suns light actually reaches the jungle floor. The amazon contains the highest species of diversity in the world. A million years ago mankind had an estimated population of 50 000. That has now grown to 7 billion. In the course of the past century humans have destroyed half of the worlds rainforest. Europeans have long viewed the amazon as a storehouse of raw materials setting the stage for the vast destructive influence we have now. The quinine found in the amazon allowed the British troops to conquer India without succumbing to malaria. No product made a bigger impact than the species of tree with the sticky white latex called rubber. The cities of Manaus, brazil and Iquitos, Peru were built because of the rubber boom. Iquitos is the largest city in the world that has no land/road access to it. Everything that comes in to Iquitos and the amazon for that matter comes in by plane or by ferry. Only 5% of Peruvian soil is suitable for agriculture. As a consequence, agriculture that began on relatively fertile terraces in the Andes has now spread to land poorly suited to the continuous agricultural exploitation. With inadequate knowledge of farming practices, farmers have no alternative but to move on carving out another plot from the rainforest. The result has been extensive deforestation. An additional impact on perus rainforest was the cocaine industry. Hundreds of thousand of hectares of virgin rainforest were destroyed in order to grow illegal plantations of coca shrubs to support the habits of north America and europe. Coke users are a major contributor to the deforestation of the amazon. Reason number 481 of why not to snort coke - you are ruining the planet...just saying. |
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