Rainforest Deforestation

            Rainforests used to cover more than fifteen percent of the earth’s land surface, but today that number has been more than cut in half. Although it seems like a lot of the earth is covered, that number is rapidly decreasing because of human activity. People have done two things to destroy the rainforest: first, people cut down the trees and second, they move into the area that was cut down.

            As the human population grew through the second half of the twentieth century, the need for resources and land grew as well. People began taking to the rainforests all over the world because of all the space that they cover. And because the population continues to grow, people are taking more and more out of the forests. The Amazon in Brazil is the most deforested rainforest in the world. With one and a half acres of rainforest being lost every second on average, the Amazon could be lost entirely in the next forty years. The deforestation has been estimated to kill over 50,000 species of plants and animals a year and the number can only go up unless something is done about it. There has even been an entire tribe of people found in the rainforest that had never seen the outside world until deforestation destroyed their world. But deforestation is not the only thing destroying the rainforest, settlers and squatters do a lot of damage too.

            After the trees have been cut down and the land left barren, all nature wants to do is rebuild itself, but people move in and take the land for themselves. Squatters move in on the land to set up farms and homes without any land ownership. But the thing is, the government has been corrupted to a point that it doesn’t even matter whether or not people have land rights. This is the kind of stuff that makes it impossible for nature to take back what it once had. This is the reason for an island civilization.

            An island civilization would be completely separate from nature. People would no longer be in a place to interfere with the processes of nature. It could take back the world while people wait and watch from giant bubbles on land, in the sky, and under water.

            This is a good article that shows the kind of things that happen to the rainforest because of human interference http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/habitats/last-of-amazon/