Here is an article that contains some interesting facts on rain forests and the like. Apparently there is a debate among environmentalists and others about the millions of acres "new forests" popping up around the world. Many of these new forests are not being counted or mapped by some environmentalists who have a stake in "saving the rain forest". Politics among the tree huggers.
Some people try to argue that corn-based ethanol results in land use changes - as in for every acre of corn grown for biofuels an acre of rain forest is cut down. Those arguments are simplistic at best. Or may just garbage. (Check out this post at the MidwestCornGrowers blog about their study tour to South America.)
Anyway, here are a few lines from the article...
About 38 million acres of original rain forest are being cut down every year, but in 2005, according to the most recent "State of the World’s Forests Report" by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, there were an estimated 2.1 billion acres of potential replacement forest growing in the tropics - an area almost as large as the United States. The new forest included secondary forest on former farmland and so-called degraded forest, land that has been partly logged or destroyed by natural disasters like fires and then left to nature. In Panama by the 1990s, the last decade for which data is available, the rain forest is being destroyed at a rate of 1.3 percent each year. The area of secondary forest is increasing by more than 4 percent yearly.
And here are a few reasons included in the article as to why areas are reverting...
New jobs tied to global industry, as well as improved transportation, are luring a rural population to fast-growing cities. Better farming techniques and access to seed and fertilizer mean that marginal lands are no longer farmed because it takes fewer farmers to feed a growing population.
Maybe if some people stopped pointing fingers all the time they would realize that today's high tech farms can feed and fuel the world - while taking care of the environment.
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