Background:
Deforestation is the intentional clearance of forests by logging and/or burning (popularly known as slash and burn). Deforestation occurs for many reasons: trees or derived charcoal are used as, or sold, for fuel or as lumber, while cleared land is used as pasture for livestock, plantations of commodities, and settlements. The removal of trees without sufficient reforestation has resulted in damage to habitat, biodiversity loss and aridity. It has adverse impacts on biosequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Deforested regions typically incur significant adverse soil erosion and frequently degrade into wasteland. Disregard or ignorance of intrinsic value, lack of ascribed value, lax forest management and deficient environmental laws are some of the factors that allow deforestation to occur on a large scale. In many countries, deforestation is an ongoing issue that is causing extinction, changes to climatic conditions, desertification, and displacement of indigenous people.
Pros:
1. Although deforestation is not totally good, it has some promising advantages for the people. Its direct purposes have effects, which significantly contribute to the atmosphere and to the environment. For example, the cutting of trees lets the carbon dioxide stay on them rather than emit it in the air such that in the case of dying and rotten tress.
2. Also, much of the vast part of the forest is left unused which can be turned to agricultural sites instead. This way, it will help feed millions of starving people. Some parts of the forest can also be turned into great infrastructures, which will give rise to a booming economy, thus helping the people as well. Grazing animals are also one way that deforestation becomes useful. Truly, the advantages could be quite innumerable if summed up. However, weighing the good and harm that deforestation brings should always be considered.
3. One of the easiest benefits of deforestation to spot are the economic ones. Lumber products are one of the most staple constructive materials in human society. Whether it's raw lumber used for making tables and houses, or paper and other wood by-products, we simply cannot live without the use of lumber. Like steel and stone, wood is one of the most basic natural resources, and unlike steel and stone, it is renewable simply by growing more trees. The only real trick to balancing its consumption is to grow more trees to replace the ones taken.
4. Keep in mind that a lot of jobs revolve around the use of lumber. Wood cutters aside, there are those who work in processing plants to make glue from wood sap, process pulp into paper, and others. This is another benefit of deforestation; it opens more job opportunities for people who would otherwise be unemployed. These job opportunities are more than simply a humanitarian concept; society at large would suffer if all of the people working in the wood industry were to suddenly find themselves jobless.
5. Another benefit of deforestation to consider is the access it provides to other natural resources that may lay within the forest's land area. Some places with heavy forests are home to iron ore, mineral, and even oil deposits, which can be used for man's needs. These natural resources would otherwise lay dormant and untapped unless people access them. The act of deforestation may not be entirely necessary to get at these deposits sometimes, but coupled with the advantages given above, the combination of opening up a new mine or oil well when taken with extra living spaces or farmlands for food makes a lot of sense.
Con:
1. Its disadvantages come in a million ways. Deforestation introduces numerous community and environmental harms. The abrupt and irreversible consequences of worldwide deforestation are guaranteed to jeopardize the existence of Earth. The domino effect of deforestation includes: extinction of the biodiversity; the annihilation of the indigenous people (local inhabitants of the area); and a global change in climate. One wrong move can lead us all to an empty and meaningless world.
2. The consequence of deforestation is claimed to be a domino effect because one step to destroying nature will cause the deaths or extinction of many more species. After the death of animal and plant life is the partial loss of human life through poverty and pollution. If things pursue this way, human extinction could also be inevitable. The years are counting, and each day of that year trees are being felled and lands are being abolished of the natural wonders. If the world used to be a better and cleaner place to live in, then we can definitely start to relive those days now.
3. Deforestation is causing a loss of biological diversity on an unprecedented scale. Although tropical forests cover only six percent of Earths land surface, they happen to contain between 70% and 90% of all of the worlds species As a result of deforestation, we are losing between 50 and 100 animal and plant species each day. Inevitably, the loss of species entails a loss of genetic resources. Many of these species now facing the possibility of extinction are of enormous potential to humans in many areas; especially medicine. As of 1991, over 25% of the worlds pharmaceutical products were derived from tropical plants. By contributing to the extinction of multiple species of plants and animals, we might be destroying the cures for many of the diseases that plague the human race today.
4. The problem is that once forests have been cut down, essential nutrients are washed out of the soil all together. This leads to soil erosion. As of now, about 80% of the soils in the humid tropics are acidic and infertile. When there are no trees to keep the soil in place, the soil becomes ripe for erosion. It dries and cracks under the suns heat. Once the soil temperature exceeds 25 degrees centigrade, volatile nutrient ingredients like nitrogen can be lost, further reducing the fertility of the remaining soil. Furthermore, rainfall washes remaining nutrients into rivers. This means that replanting trees will not necessarily help to solve the problems of deforestation; by the time the trees have matured, the soil might be completely stripped of essential nutrients. Eventually, cultivation in the forest regions will be impossible, and the land will be useless. The soil erosion will lead to permanent impoverishment of huge land areas.
5. Clearing the forest dramatically increases the surface run-off from rainfall, mainly because a greater proportion of the rain reaches the ground due to a lack of vegetation that would suck up the excess rainfall. "Tropical forests can receive as much rain in an hour as London would expect in a wet month, and a single storm has been measured as removing 185 tons of topsoil per hectare" (Dudley 21). In tropical regions where the forests are dense, flooding is not as serious a problem because there is vegetation to absorb the rainfall. It is in areas where there is little vegetation that there is a problem. Hence, to avoid the disastrous effects of flooding, tropical forests need to remain dense and lush.
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