Deforestation
The giant swayed…began to topple. Gathering speed in its fall, it smashed through trees in its path with a roar like a passing train. With a thunderclap it struck the forest floor, so hard the bole splintered. The tree’s impact shook the earth beneath my feet, jarred the pen in my hand. Its true impact reached much further. With its felling, tiny ecological ripples spread through the environment—like the unforeseen effects of so many of our acts.
My jarana was made up largely of carbon; within years the burned or rotted wood would transmute into carbon dioxide, contributing to global warming and intensifying the greenhouse effect. Standing, it had been an ecological asset, capturing and storing carbon dioxide, sweetening the atmosphere with exhalations of oxygen. The tree’s death dealt a wound, minute but measurable, to the surrounding forest community—to the biodiversity of its niche of Amazonia. The nests in its branches, the nectar of its flowers, the carbon that its root hairs fed to the fungi, the nutrients it took from the air and pumped into thesoil—all of these bore value to the diverse web of life of which it was a part. The tree’s fall ever so slightly changed Amazonia’s climate. Each day the roots had drawn up thousands of gallons of groundwater for the leaves to return to the clouds from whence the water had come. The leaves’ transpiration and shade had bestowed a coolness. Now the niche was a little drier, a little warmer, and the microclimate in Para would reflect it. No one involved in this everyday event had done anything wrong. The chain saw operator needed the job. The landowner needed the wood. Neither intended ill effects for planet Earth. Certainly, neither stood alone in what he had done. Though Para is Brazil’s most deforested state, I would see much worse in many other places; mountains in the Philippines and northern Pakistan stripped of every tree; slopes in Kenya denuded and eroding; vast tracts of once magnificent forest laid bare in the United States.”
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