Depleting the lungs of our planet
“When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
—John Muir
WHERE DO I START HERE? TALK about a comfortable state of being unaware. But why should you have any interest in or be concerned about some trees that grow somewhere else in the world? Because while you order your steak or burger for dinner, another acre of rainforest—and all the life it contains—is destroyed. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? After all, you are just ordering food in a restaurant because you are hungry, and you have other things to think about—your job, the economy, clothes, your car, your next vacation. Where does the rainforest come in?
Well, first of all, rainforests exist, even though you won’t drive past one on your way home, and you most likely have not invested in the rainforest in any of your retirement funds. Let’s go back to that burger you ate at lunch—or any other meat that you have eaten over the course of your lifetime. Where did it come from?
Over 70 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed—lost forever—due to cattle ranching. The United States is the single largest consumer of Central and South American beef.26 A startling 95 percent of Brazil’s Atlantic coast rainforest has been slashed and burned, the vast majority of it to raise cattle.27 Although it is not commonly known, approximately 34 million acres of rainforest on earth are lost each year.28
Consider this: When fires occur in California, it is broadcast on the news. During October 2007, for example, when approximately 190,000 acres in California were lost, there was seemingly non-stop news coverage. That same year, over 30 million acres were lost in the rainforests, with no news coverage whatsoever. Is one circumstance really less devastating than the other? In fact, over 30 million acres of rainforests per year have been lost every year since the 1970s. Although some of this rainforest land is logged, most is slashed and burned, then used to either raise cattle or to raise crops to feed to cattle. As much as 80 percent of all global rainforest loss is turned into grazing for cattle or crops for livestock, and the process is extremely land-intensive. It requires fifty-five square feet of rainforest to produce just one quarter-pound burger. The crops grown on cleared rainforest are used to feed not only cattle but also chickens, turkeys, and pigs. In one crop season alone, 2004–2005, more than 2.9 million acres of rainforest were destroyed, primarily to grow crops for chickens used by Kentucky Fried Chicken.29
Another crop that is grown is soy, but not for direct human use. Soy used directly for veggie burgers, tofu, and soy milk in America is almost exclusively grown in the United States, but 80 percent of the entire world’s soy crop is produced and fed to farmed animals. Most of this soy is now grown on rainforest-cleared land.30
You may say, “Big deal—what good are rainforests? They’re just some trees somewhere else in the world that I will never see. I would rather have my meat.” First and foremost, the rainforests produce more than 20 percent of the world’s oxygen supply. They provide an environmentally essential task of continuously recycling the air and pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere, while putting O2 back into it. So with every acre of rainforest lost to support the meat industry, the earth loses part of its lungs and the ability to breathe and produce a fresh supply of oxygen—fourteen tons of oxygen per acre per year—while taking out tons of global-warming CO231
Fifty years ago, 15 percent of our planet was composed of rainforest; today, this has been reduced to less than 2 percent. Despite this loss, almost 50 percent of all types of living things (equaling five million species of plants, animals, and insects) reside in rainforests. Although numerous species have yet to be discovered, scientists estimate that at least one hundred species per day are lost when the forest is cut down. In Brazil’s Atlantic coast rainforest, of which less than 5 percent remains today, 70 percent of its plants and twenty primate species are endemic (they are found nowhere else in the world). The enormous biodiversity of the rainforest implores respect and the need to preserve it, not to destroy it. Less than 1 percent of its millions of species have ever been studied by scientists. One pond in Brazil can sustain a greater variety of fish than are found in all of Europe’s rivers. Just a two-acre area of rainforest may contain over 750 types of trees (more than the total tree diversity of North America) and 1,500 species of plants. The demand for meat and the subsequent loss of rainforests has been responsible for the disappearance of over ninety different Amazonian tribes.32
Descendants of the Amerindians have lived in the rainforest for some 20,000 years, with traditions that have allowed them to exist in harmony with the forest without destroying it.33 Today, with massive destruction due to our demand for meat, there are fewer than 250,000 native people living in the Amazon forests, where there were once more than six million.34 Many scientists believe there are as many as fifty different indigenous groups still living in the depths of the forests that have never had contact with the outside world. As these ancient forests are cleared to make room for cattle or feed crops for livestock, habitat is lost to tribes and their sustainable way of traditional life. Once the forests die, so do the Amazonian people. These tribes, with their medicine men, or shamans, have a wealth of knowledge, particularly the medicinal properties of the thousands of plants found in the rainforests—knowledge that will die with them. A single tribe may use more than two hundred species of plants for medicinal purposes alone.35 Because of our demand for meat, there has been needless destruction of ancient rainforests. With this, there has been the unfortunate loss of indigenous tribes and their shamans. And when a medicine man dies, the world loses thousands of years of knowledge that is irreplaceable … but at least you get a burger out of it.
Perhaps destroying living things and creating extinction of species still does not hit home, so let’s look at another aspect: over two thousand plants have been discovered in the rainforests that have anti-cancer properties. All botanists agree that not only are there many thousands more to be discovered but that many species are lost daily as the forests are destroyed to provide meat for the world. Medicines derived from the rainforest include:
• curare (muscle relaxant used in surgery)
• diosgenin (birth control, arthritis, asthma)
• ouabain (heart medicine)
• quinine (malaria, pneumonia)
• emetine (bronchitis, dysentery)
• vincristine (Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, and other cancers)
Vincristine is extracted from the rainforest plant periwinkle and is one of the most powerful anti-cancer drugs. It dramatically increases the survival rate for acute childhood leukemia. One-fourth of all prescription drugs and over 70 percent of all cancer treatment medications originate from the rainforest.36 It makes no sense whatsoever to destroy rainforests and all the life they contain to raise cattle or grow crops to feed animals, when plants can be grown elsewhere for us to use directly as food.
Plants in general and rainforests in particular serve as natural sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide, sequestering and storing it in vegetation and the soil. The destruction of vegetation leads to carbon release, loss of the ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and loss of the ability to create oxygen, which negatively impacts water cycles and reduces infiltration capacity and storage of the soil and increases runoff.
When millions of acres of forest, especially rainforests, are cut down, we lose in many ways:
• We lose the ability to filter harmful levels of carbon dioxide out of the air.
• We lose millions of tons of vital oxygen released into the air we breathe.
• We lose because of the millions of tons of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere by the burning of trees.
• We lose by changing the soil from its absorbing moisture and detoxifying oxygen to its being deforested, erosive and, on average, allowing for only eight years of grazing and growing crops for cattle before it has become depleted.
• We lose entire ecosystems of plants and animals—one mature rainforest tree can support three hundred to five hundred different types of plants and hundreds of species of animals
Rainforests are cleared, slashed, and burned for the timber value and then for farming and ranching operations to support the meat requirements of the world. Although local operators and businesses have some responsibility, much of the rainforest loss to support the livestock industry is accomplished by world corporate giants, such as Texaco, Unocal, Georgia Pacific, Cargill, and Mitsubishi Corporation. Regardless, the real blame for the depletion of our vital rainforests lies with the consumer who creates the demand for animal products.