Debate & Controversy continued...
Although no one can disagree that deforestation is an important issue, there is a huge debate as to who is responsible for stopping deforestation and how that process should happen.
Greenpeace, an organization concerned on global environmental issues, believes deforestation should come to an end. This organization believes that ending it would be our best chance at preserving biodiversity and defending the rights of forest communities. They are “campaigning for a deforestation-free future.” They are aware that this is a complex problem and that there is no perfect solution. They do have three approaches, which they believe “can hype the impact we need to protect our forests.”
The Lacey Act is “...a 1900 United States law that bans trafficking in illegal wildlife.” The Roadless Rule “...establishes prohibitions on road construction, road reconstruction, and timber harvesting on 58.5 million acres of inventoried roadless areas on National Forest System lands.” Also, using global treaties such as The Convention on International in Endangered Species (CITES). This treaty “... is an international agreement between governments. Its aim is to ensure that international trade in specimens of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival.”
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The other opinion.
They interviewed Marta Ortega de Wing, a sixty-four year old woman from Chilibre Panama; she said, “There is far more forest here than there was 30 years ago.”
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On January 29th, 2009, New York Times, published an article on ‘Galloping Jungle’:Farmlands revert back to nature: ‘For every acre of rainforest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing’. In this article, the authors suggest that “these new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought.” and how scientists argue that these “new forests could blunt the effects of rainforest destruction by absorbing carbon dioxide, the leading heat-trapping gas linked to global warming, one crucial role that rainforests play. They could also, to a lesser extent, provide habitat for endangered species.”
Joseph Wright, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, suggests that as a global; trend to increase urbanization many slash-and-burn (a method of agriculture in which existing vegetation is cut down and burned off before new seeds are sown, typically used as a method for clearing forest land for farming) farmers in tropical countries will leave the forest frontier to move to cities, where they will find greater economic opportunities. He argues that this will “alleviate pressures on forests by slowing the loss of old-growth forest and allowing secondary forests to regenerate on abandoned farmland.” and also believes that said trends will minimize species extinctions since “some endangered species will survive in secondary forests.” |
A secondary forest, also known as a second-growth forest, is a forest that has been logged and has recovered either naturally or artificially. However, not all secondary forests provide the same value to sustaining biological diversity, or goods and services, as the primary forest first did in the same location. In Europe, a secondary forest is forest land where there has been a period of complete clearance by humans either with or without a period of conversion to another land use. This, however, thins out the trees enough to change the forest structure dramatically.