Tropical Rainforest Research Paper

The Rainforest Issue

The tropical rain forests are a wonderful place for wild animals to roam free in their natural habitat. More than ½ of the species and ⅔ of the plants on earth live in a rainforest, but rainforests only cover 6% of the earth’s surface. Rain forests are also a big source of many of the foods we enjoy today like chocolate and sugar (What Is a Rainforest 3). They also help clean the environment. Tropical rainforests are located in a band around the equator, mostly in the area between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. This 3,000 mile (4800 km) wide band is called the "tropics."
Unfortunately these wonderful places are being destroyed at an alarming rate. “In the last 50 years, 50% of the earth's rainforest …show more content…
One of the reasons is that many people who live near or in rainforests are poor and need wood to build houses and to make fires. This causes them to constantly destroy trees without replanting them. The other, more pressing, reason is because some woods, especially hardwoods, are worth a lot of money. So to get out of poverty, people that live there cut down the forest around them, for money. Over all “Commercial logging is the single largest cause of rainforest destruction, both directly and indirectly.”(Rainforest Facts)
Rainforests are also being stripped for resources such as fuel, bauxite, oil, gold, diamonds, iron ore in Amazonia; nickel, copper, tin, coal in Indonesia; coal in Columbia and uranium, and gold in Brazil.(Rainforest Facts) Some rain forests are also being flooded for hydroelectric dams. Deforestation is bad for a few reasons. One of the reasons deforestation is bad is that it hurts our environment. It releases and causes more carbon dioxide and other harmful chemicals to remain in our atmosphere for longer. This causes the air quality to decrease, along with causing the Earth to warm. The Earth warming is an atrocious thing since it causes the glaciers to melt which raises the ocean levels along with decreases the amount of snowfall, which hurts the economy of many ski towns like ours. Deforestation also destroys the wildlife and habitat of many rain forests which can lead to species

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