Amazon Deforestation

Do you know what forest is this? This is one of the most famous forests in the world, the Amazon rainforest. How about this one? Unfortunately, this is also, an Amazon Rainforest. And most of us will know that this transition is called “Deforestation”.

A deforestation is an act of cutting down or burning trees in the region, mostly illegally. Recently I sent out a survey, to some of the middle school students of KISJ, and the majority of them seemed to learn what deforestation is and how it is related to us through lots of different media. It means that they will know how important the Amazon rainforest is. As an example, we can look at current humanity's No.1 enemy, carbon emissions. Now, it seems like carbon emissions if off-topic for the Amazon rainforest and its deforestation, but it isn’t. Have you heard of the term, “Carbon Sink”? A carbon sink is anything that absorbs more carbon from the atmosphere than it releases. And this Amazon rainforest is a huge carbon sink with billions of trees! A short quiz. How many tree species and individuals do you think are there in the Amazon rainforest? The answer is, 16,000 tree species and 390 billion individual trees! That’s a huge amount of trees! And according to Dr. Thomas Lovejoy, these trees absorb a quarter of the whole carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and help humans by keeping all the CO2 that we emitted.

So the Amazon rainforest doesn’t have any disadvantages for humanity. It only helps us a lot. However, people are deforesting this paradise. Why? Because this place can bring lots of colorful papers to them.

Do you guys recognize this logo? I’m sure most of us will know because it is one of the most famous fast-food companies in the world. Surprisingly, companies like Burger King don’t always do good things. According to one Newsela article, Burger King’s suppliers, Bunge and Cargill buy soybeans from deforested land of the Amazon rainforest. This means as we buy more food from Burger King, more lands will be deforested. Because the world is way richer than before, people demand more meat which will lead to more destruction in the Amazon rainforest. As some companies cause an action that destroys the Amazon rainforest to make their products, some people refuse to buy products from those specific companies. In another word, they boycott. So I added another question in the survey to see how many students are about boycotting products from companies that can potentially cause deforestation. Sadly, only a few of them said yes and most of the others said no or never thought about it. These numerous illegal loggings happening in the Amazon rainforest must stop.

There are lots of simple ways you can support deforestation. As mentioned earlier, you can boycott products from the Amazon rainforest, or you can donate or even join campaigns like the Amazon Conservation Association. You can even start small by not wasting any more paper products. As the Amazon rainforest is being deforested at a tremendous pace, we must act fast before it’s too late.