Sprouting Solutions for Deforestation Dilemma

            Sprouting Solutions for Deforestation Dilemma.
             Perhaps to thoroughly understand a rainforest"s beauty, one would have to see a rainforest with his very eyes. One would also believe that the many majestic trees and amazingly exotic animals that live there would probably be enough to keep any person form wanting to harm the forests in any way. Unfortunately, like all good things, the biggest rainforest called the Amazon is being destroyed everyday, which is a tremendous loss considering the importance of this particular forest. "The Amazon contains many species and plants not found anywhere else, and considering one-third of all the species in the world live there, it has the greatest biodiversity on earth ("The Amazon," 2002, p. 1)." The Amazon also goes through a process of continuously taking in carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen and because of this is often referred to as the "Lungs of our Planet" (Taylor, 2001). Another important thing to know is that the basin of the forest contains roughly ten percent of all carbon dioxide in the terrestrial ecosystems ("Amazon carbon ebbs," 1998). Although the destruction of rainforests is a growing problem, much is being done to resolve the problem.
             With all the destruction going on it is important to pick up on the indicators of the problem. For example, rainforests once covered fourteen percent of the earth's land surface and now they cover a mere six percent (Taylor, 2001). Also, when the Amazon rainforest was looked at by a satellite to assess the damage, the satellite didn't show near as much damage as when Dr. Daniel Nepstad's team did a field survey, including 1,593 interviews with wood mill operators and landlords ("Sci/Tech Amazon forest," 1999). Another indication is that Penn State's model guess for deforestation predicted forty to fifty years until Brazil is forest free, and seventy-five to one hundred years until total rainforest loss ("Loss of Amazon," 2001).