Term Paper on "Deforestation Effects"

Term Paper 4 pages (1242 words) Sources: 4 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Deforestation

Effects of Deforestation

The purpose of the current study is to contribute to the knowledge base thoroughly analyzing new deforestation and development data covering the various locations of deforestation up to 2007. The researcher hopes to enrich the current database available, raise new questions, and stimulate additional research. The current researchers believe this kind of analysis is important given the current ongoing discussions regarding global warming. In spite of the considerable political attention that forests have received, little has hitherto been achieved on the ground: tropical deforestation and forest degradation have continued at an unaltered pace. The demands of present societies continue to create pressures that lead to the elimination of forest cover in developing countries. (Wunder 1)

Although deforestation is a phenomenon as old as agriculture, current concern over forest loss is justified by the sheer scale of modern-day destruction." (Ehrhardt-Martinez 567)

Few environmental issues have attracted as much attention worldwide in recent years as deforestation. A major reason for the high visibility of deforestation as an issue is of course its overall impact on the earth's ecological well-being. Third World deforestation also draws attention because of the ways its local ecological, social, and economic causes and consequences ripple around the globe. They note that the primary human contributions to Third World deforestation include commercial logging, increased worldwide consumption of industrial wood, clearing of forests for settlement and agriculture, overpopulation, globalization of trade in wood products, economic development, overgrazing, poor harvest practices, and inadequate enforcement of existing laws. Primary effects on Third World forest communities and their people are unemployment and poverty, ill health, and community displacement and decline. These causes and consequences are all longstanding concerns of community development. (Hibbard)

The current rate of deforestation of approximately 11.3 million hectares of forest worldwide each year, the forests may be irreparably depleted long before a full scientific understanding of the implications of that loss is achieved. Furthermore, they generally find that the long-run value of an intact forest is much higher than the value of alternative land uses. Developmentalists argue that the tangible benefits of current deforestation and the land uses that replace the forest outweigh the potential future benefits of standing forests. They note that the total amount of forested area in the world has been reduced from a maximum of about 6 billion hectares to about 3.5 billion hectares without yet causing catastrophic damage to global life support systems, and they question the proposition that such a change, were it to occur, would prove insurmountable. They contend that a more likely scenario is that global climate change could be dealt with by adaptation and the development of new technologies, leaving their populations better off in the end. (Andersen et al. 2)

Although over the last two decades deforestation has attracted an increasing interest from a large number of scholars and institutions, separate interpretations coexist in the current debate on the precise meaning of the word or its delimitation in regard to related terms such as 'forest loss', 'fragmentation', 'conversion', 'degradation' and 'forest decline'. This involves not only disagreement about what types of anthropogenic intervention are to be seen as compatible with the 'forest' label, but also a more basic debate about which tree-based ecosystems may be characterized as forests, e.g. mono-cultural tree plantations with a limited range of forest services, or comparison between closed and open forests, woodlands, shrub lands, fallows, and so on. For instance, substitution of natural forests by plantations may be regarded as reforestation by government planners, but as deforestation by conservationists. (Wunder 9)

As a measure of human impact on the natural environment, deforestation is a question of both sociological and theoretical import. While human ecologists have often pondered the effects of the… READ MORE

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