When the Spaniards arrived in the Philippines in 1521 approximately 27.5 million hectares or 92% was covered by forest and jungle. They harvested timber for shipbuilding. Population growth made after 1800 arable land desirable. In 300 years, 1.4 million hectares were lost, remaining 26 million hectares.
Then the amount of felled forest of 5,000 hectares in 1800 increased to 50,000 per year in 1900, mainly to make way for plantations of tobacco and sugar cane.
From 1904, the harvest rose to 150,000 ha / yr. At 50 years, the Americans uprooted more forest than the Spaniards in about 400 years. In the sixties deforestation peaked at 300,000 ha / yr. In 1987, there was less than 7 million hectares, about a quarter of the original.
In 2000 there was 5.5 million ha, of which 800,000 ha originally rainforest in the high mountains.
Deforestation is now seen as one of the reasons for the floods. The sponge function of the forest disappeared. The layer of fertile soil washes away, soil dries and rivers silt up.
The floods in Bangladesh, for example, are a result of deforestation in Nepal.
There are three large areas of rainforest: the Amazon forest in Brazil, the Paradise Forests in Southeast Asia and the Congo Basin in Central Africa.
Before Indonesia, Sudan, Tanzania and Zambia, is Brazil the largest producer of wood.
A few hundred years ago, 16 million km2 of the earth was covered with tropical rainforest. In 1982 there was still 5 million left.
People deforest to sell timber, to have fuel or to win land for agriculture, farming or construction, mining and roads. Animals, plants and entire ecosystems disappear or disrupt, like soil (erosion), rivers (floods) and climate.
Water flows faster away to rivers with reduced capacity. Reduces the amount of evaporation because water flows away quickly. This may also decrease precipitation.
Forests mitigate extremes in heat, cold, drought, rainfall and wind speed.
Many biodiversity disappears from the remaining fragments that are more susceptible to drought and fire.
There is less CO2 absorbed by the biomass, and more CO2 emitted by burning them.
Rainforests are pumping massive O ² in the air that we use to breath again. But the lungs of the earth are sick and gurgle.
An estimated 29 million hectares of forest disappears every year.
Only two-thirds of the Amazon is intact. In 30 years, there is an area of 589,000 km ², larger than France, clear-cut.
Without trees sunlight reaches the earth much more direct and dries the soil out by which there arises desert.
In 2009, 7,008 square kilometers of tropical forest disappeared.
In 2020, 25% of the original Brazilian Amazon forest are gone.
Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC is a certification indicating that wood comes from a sustainably managed forest.
Every second 3,000 to 5,000 m2 of forest disappears, about one football field.
Flanders is with a forest index of 13% one of the forest poorest regions in Europe. Therefore there is a strict regime to preserve it as well as possible and protect the forest. Deforestation is prohibited except with planning permission and compensation.
For all felling without an approved forest management plan, you must apply for a felling permit.
Great Britain lost in the last 300 years 95% of its forest, U.S. 40%, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and some other countries 80 to 90%. Sweden retained half of its forest cover.
In Nature, scientists from the Max - Planck - Institut (Mainz) published on January 12, 2006
surprising that green plants also produce methane. But that amount is about ten times smaller than the carbon storage. A forest reduces the amount of greenhouse gas thus ten times more than that increases those. Also, the cutting does not necessarily lead to a decrease in methane production, because alternate grassland or agriculture as well produce methane. And forest soils absorb about as much methane as the trees themselves emit.
Easter Island is 4 km long, triangular and 163.6 km2, about the size of Texel. The 'navel of the world“ is the most isolated inhabited island in the world, located approximately between Chile and Tahiti.
The island is discovered in the year 400 AD. by the Polynesians. Easter Sunday 1722, the Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen visited it and saw three separate groups of people with dark skin, red skin and a very pale group with red hair.
In 1862, more than a thousand people were easy prey for Peruvian slavers who destroyed even the last bit of culture present.
The only 15 survivors were allowed to return after a few months and brought deadly diseases, such as smallpox and tuberculosis along. That cost to the majority of the remaining population lives. In 1877 were only 111 of the original inhabitants alive.
Moai, huge carved monoliths stand along the coastline. Most face inland.
The average statue is four meters high and 12.5 tonnes. Some Moai are estimated at 80,000 to 90,000 kg. They are located 14 kilometers from the quarry where they were carved.
They were lashed to two stems, moved through the rocky terrain on wooden rollers.
According to the calculations (Schiller) in 5 to 7 days to 5h/day by 55 to 75 workers.
There is also a not yet fully chopped free statue of 22 meters in length.
The islanders have always claimed that the statues walked to their place. They seem to be eventually right, as shown in a movie by researchers Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpNuh-J5IgE&feature=player_embedded.
(Meanwhile is showed that they also have a huge underground body.)
As mysterious is the still untranslated Rongo - Rongo writing, which was carved in sticks and tablets. Of them, there are still 21.
The Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl (1914 - 2002) has shown with adventurous expedition travelings that representatives of ancient cultures may have been in contact with each other already.
In 1947 he traveled with the Kon - Tiki, a balsa raft over the Pacific from South America to Easter Island.
Easter island was often used as a model habitat for the earth.
For at least 37,000 years, there grew a large, now extinct species of palm. Which reached after about a hundred years its greatest height.
Around 1600 there were seven or eight thousand people who needed wood for houses, heating, canoes and dragging statues. This created an ecological crisis.
Pollen research indicates that no tree grew here anymore after 1600.
Overpopulation, deforestation and depletion of finite reserves of natural resources led to a downward spiral in the civilization of Easter Island.
The Polynesian rat is to blame for the disappearance of Easter Island palm: 99% of the found fossilized palm seeds had been gnawed. As a result, the forest could not rejuvenate. Deforestation also occurred less rainfall.
Biosphere 2
Oxygen, O, is vital. The air contains approximately 21%.
Was it more than life was burned on earth, as it is very reactive. With less our lifes would not be possible. And ozone (O3) forms a layer that protects us from harmful UV rays. Thanks to oxygen could land animals develop, and hence the human being.
Biosphere 2 is a 1.27 -hectare greenhouse in Arizona where a closed ecological system like the earth was imitated, complete with desert, jungle, swamp, savannah, ocean and agriculture. Bionauts tried to provide in their own food and air, without outside help. (Biosphere 2 was a major inspiration for Big Brother.)
During the first expedition of September 26, 1991 to September 26, 1993, the oxygen level felled from 20.9% to 14%.
An excess of organic soil life fixed oxygen as CO2. Through uptake by plants, the O2 would be released back into the air. Unfortunately, also showed a chemical reaction of the concrete foundations unforeseen to absorb (too many) O2 and C.
Depending on metabolism, activities, temperature, type of plant, the quantity of light, there is about 25 m2 chlorophyll / person / day required in order to make sufficient oxygen through photosynthesis.
As long as we continue to burn hydrocarbons faster than the environmental can absorb the by-products (CO2 and water vapor) to make oxygen again it seems that the amount of oxygen will continue to decline in the atmosphere.
This is also a way to make even Earth, our biotope (Biosphere 1) for ourselves uninhabitable and toxic
As human treats nature, nature will treat humans. (Hedwig Conrad - Martius)
Nature conservation is the protection of nature by man against the nature of man. (Willem Van Os)