Burning Our Legacy

[Dave Mundt]

Greetings and salutations... While I was poking about on the Net earlier, I ran across this image from a NASA site:

As a woodworker, I have to cringe when I think about the many, many thousands of acres of tropical hardwoods that are destroyed like this every year. Part of the sadness of this is that it takes decades of growth to replace what is destroyed in a day or two of burning. It would seem to me that it would be a good thing to find a way to keep this tragedy from happening... With all the technology available today, it should not be that hard to get food and other basic needs to these folks, so that they can have a sustainable life based on wise harvesting of the wood from the forest. But hey...I also think that folks should at least make a SMALL effort to drive at the posted speed limits... Regards Dave Mundt

[George]

Let 'em eat cake?

My neighbors, lifelong loggers, still planted apple trees in their eighties. They didn't try to make other people do things.

[J. Clarke]

While it's a bit preachy, has a fair discussion of the problem. It's not as simple as "let them eat cake"--a lot of the destruction doesn't _have_ to happen.

Unfortunately, most countries that have extensive rain forest haven't figured out yet that those trees are a "cash crop" to be preserved rather than an obstacle to be removed.

_id=12443>

[Roonaldo]

it's a small price to pay to make more land to produce more cheap beef for McDonald's .........

[J. Clarke]

Except that that's not what they're doing with it. It's mostly subsistence farmers.

[Mark & Juanita]

... and some well-intentioned,but misguided policies contribute to that problem, specifically policies that, with the intent of saving rain forest, prohibit trade in lumber from those rainforests. If the citizens of those countries were allowed to harvest that lumber and sell it, the amount of trees destroyed would actually decrease and could become a sustainable crop in and of themselves.