Recent estimates of deforestation suggest that between 1 to 3 million hectares are being cleared annually in the Amazon Basin (Lawrence 1997; Fig. 3). Based on estimates of 1% annual tropical forest loss, the Amazon may be losing as many as 11 to 16 species per day (Wilson 1989), and the resulting ecosystems are often highly degraded (Buschbacher 1986).

The deforestation of Amazonia presents a challenging study of the interactions among people, their values, and the environment.

 Is deforestation in the Amazon any different than what occurred in industrialized Europe and North America centuries past?

 Should Amazonians develop their lands as they see fit?

Factors leading to rapid tropical deforestation

Deforestation robs the world of countless species, destroying crucial biodiversity and losing species with potential uses in medicine, agriculture and industry. Biodiversity is important because it contributes to resiliency. A world without biodiversity would be fragile and likely to amplify disturbance into catastrophe through the collapse of ecosystems that had lost keystone species. Thus, biodiversity reduction, combined with climate change, has the potential to spin out of control and to threaten the prosperity of global civilization. Already the scale of biodiversity caused by the present generation of human activities ranks with the great prehistoric extinctions. Recovery from this level of disturbance will require tens of millions of years.

Disturbance regulation Damping of ecosystem response to environmental fluctuation Storm protection, flood control, drought recovery

The Ecosystem - The ecosystem plays a very important role in the rainforest. It gives it many services, and their functions play a vital role in the maintaining the rain forest. These services are summarised below -

6. rapid degradation of pastures due to poor soil quality and the costs of reclamation

Most of these ecological services we take for granted every day because they are free. Costanza and others try to "capture" non-consumptive values in order to make economic benefit-cost analyses reflect the true value of nature, or, equivalently, the true costs of polluting and degrading the environment. The more humans damage the global environment, and permanently alter or disable the free ecological services that nature provides, the greater amount of money we will have to spend to provide these services ourselves. Some services, like global gas regulation or ozone, may be impossible to replace.

Deforestation is a major global problem with serious consequences to the planet. These consequences have negative effects on the climate, biodiversity, the atmosphere, and threatens the cultural and physical survival of indigenous peoples. Effects of deforestation are too great to continue destroying the forests.

Refugia Habitat for resident and transient populations Overwintering grounds for waterfowl

Soil formation Soil formation processes Weathering of rock and the accumulation of organic matter

Climate regulation Regulation of global temperature, precipitation Greenhouse gas regulation

Water supply Storage and retention of water Provisioning of water by watersheds and aquifers

Raw materials Portion of NPP used for raw materials Production of lumber and fuel

Some common words found in the essay are:
Amazon Basin, Cultural Providing, O3 UV, Greenhouse Effect, Solutions Deforestation, Portion NPP, Amazon Image, Labeling Act, Rio Conference, Basin Lawrence, regulation regulation, gas regulation, tropical forests, et al, costanza et al, soil formation, costanza et, waste treatment, providing opportunities, portion npp, raw materials, et al 1997a, formation processes weathering, weathering rock accumulation, processes weathering rock,
Approximate Word count = 2093
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)