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Erosion and Its Effects
J. Omang ("In the Tropics, still rolling back the rain forest primeval," Smithsonian (March 1987) reported the rate of erosion in Costa Rica.
Photograhper Frans Lanting made the comment that from space it looks as if Madagascar is bleeding to death from rampant erosion in A World Out of Time-Madagascar, New York: Aperture Foundation, Inc., 1990.
UNESCO/UNEP/FAO, in Tropical Forest Ecosystems, 1978 provides the erosion rates for different vegetation types in an Ivory Coast study.
A discussion on the worst coral bleaching on record in 1998 can be found in Wilkinson et al., (Wilkinson, C., O. Linden, H. Cesar, G. Hodgson, J. Rubens, and A. E. Stong, "Ecological and socioeconomic impacts of 1998 coral bleaching in the Indian Ocean: an ENSO impact and a warning of future change?" Ambio, 1999) the U.S. Department of State's "Coral Bleaching, Coral Mortality, and Global Climate Change," Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs U.S. Department of State, March 5, 1999; and Wilkinson, C. and Hodgson, G. ("Coral reefs and the 1997-1998 mass bleaching and mortality," Nature and Resources Vol. 5, No. 2, Apr-June 1999).
Magrath and Areans (Magrath, W. and P. Arens., The costs of soil erosion on Java: a natural resource accounting approach, The World Bank, Washington, D.C., 1993) estimate the annual cost of erosion for Java in terms of rice production.
Loss of Species Important to Forest Regeneration
The decline in North American migratory birds over the 1978-1988 period is reported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in its Breeding Birds Survey 1990 and further detailed in Terborgh, J.W., Where Have All the Birds Gone? Essays on the Biology and Conservation of Birds that Migrate to the American Tropics, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989.
Increase of Tropical Diseases
H.J. Van der Kaay discusses the threat of emerging pathogens resulting from increased forest loss and contact with primary disease hosts in "Human diseases in relation to the degradation of tropical rainforests," Rainforest Medical Bulletin, Vol. 5, no. 3, Dec. 1998.
In her work, The Coming Plague (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), L. Garrett reviews the gamut newly emerging diseases and suggests the importance of deforestation in bringing some pathogens in closer contact with human populations. For a popular and thrilling account of one such virus, the hemorrhagic Ebola virus, read R. Preston's The Hot Zone (New York: Random House, 1994). S. Morse, ed. also provides a comprehensive overview in Emerging Viruses, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Y. Baskin discusses the role of human activities in creating new disease vectors in the tropics ("The Work Of Nature," Discover Vol. 16, No. 8, Aug 1995).
The Rainforest Action Network (RAN 1994) estimates the death rate from malaria among the Yanomani in Brazil and Venezuela at 20%.
Martin and Lefebvre raise the concern that global climate change will impact the distribution of malaria in "Malaria and climate: sensitivity of malaria potential transmission to climate," Ambio Vol. 24 No. 4, June 1995, while Binder et al. estimates malaria pediatric fatalities in Sub-Saharan Africa in "Emerging infectious diseases: public health issue for the 21st century," Science Vol. 284, No. 5418 (1311-1313) 21-May-1999.
According to Binder et al., infectious disease is the leading cause of death worldwide and the third leading cause of death in the United States ("Emerging infectious diseases: public health issue for the 21st century," Science Vol. 284, No. 5418 (1311-1313) 21-May-1999).
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported to a congressional committee in 1997 that 10% of people who died before the age of 50 in 1994 did so suddenly and mysteriously possibly from some unidentified infection. In addition, the CDC noted that the U.S. spent only $42 million annually on infectious disease surveillence.
In the World Populaztion Profile: 1998 (U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 1999), the U.S. Bureau of the Census revealed the sobering impact of AIDS in the developing world.
E. Hooper (The River, Boston: Little, Brown and Company 1999) provides an excellent overview of the theories on origin of AIDS. He discusses the merits each of these in the course of describing the OVP/AIDS hypothesis he has come to adopt. This hypothesis says AIDS originated from the contimanation of a live polio vaccine with a simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) during the mid to late-1950s. The other leading hypothesis, that of a "natural transfer" between SIV-infected chimpanzees and humans, is promoted in a widely read paper by F. Gao et al. ("Origin of HIV-1 in the Chimpanzee Pan troglodytes troglodytes," Nature, Vol. 397 (436-441), 1999).
At the 7th Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections in San Francisco, B. Korber announced that the Los Alamos National Laboratory had traced the divergence of AIDS from SIV to around 1930 (Korber, B. et al., "HIV Databases and Analysis Projects at Los Alamos: An Overview," 1/30/00). The study assumed genetic changes in the virus occur at a constant rate. Should this dating prove correct it would undermine OPV/AIDS hypothesis supported by Hopper 1999.
"Rainforest" is used interchangeably with "rain forest" on this site. "Jungle" is generally not used.
Recent news
Beef consumption fuels rainforest destruction (02/16/2009)
Nearly 80 percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon results from cattle ranching, according to a new report by Greenpeace. The finding confirms what Amazon researchers have long known – that Brazil's rise to become the world's largest exporter of beef has come at the expense of Earth's biggest rainforest.
How to save the Amazon rainforest (01/04/2009)
Environmentalists have long voiced concern over the vanishing Amazon rainforest, but they haven't been particularly effective at slowing forest loss. In fact, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in donor funds that have flowed into the region since 2000 and the establishment of more than 100 million hectares of protected areas since 2002, average annual deforestation rates have increased since the 1990s, peaking at 73,785 square kilometers (28,488 square miles) of forest loss between 2002 and 2004. With land prices fast appreciating, cattle ranching and industrial soy farms expanding, and billions of dollars' worth of new infrastructure projects in the works, development pressure on the Amazon is expected to accelerate. Given these trends, it is apparent that conservation efforts alone will not determine the fate of the Amazon or other rainforests. Some argue that market measures, which value forests for the ecosystem services they provide as well as reward developers for environmental performance, will be the key to saving the Amazon from large-scale destruction. In the end it may be the very markets currently driving deforestation that save forests.
Amazon rainforest damage surges 67% in 2008 (12/20/2008)
The area of rainforest in the process of being deforested — razed but not yet cleared — surged in the Brazilian Amazon during 2008, according to new figures released by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The announcement comes shortly after the Brazilian government reported a 4 percent increase in forest clearing for the year. Using an advanced satellite system that tracks changes in vegetation cover INPE found that 24,932 square kilometers of Amazon forest was damaged between August 2007 and July 2008, an increase of 10,017 square kilometers -- 67 percent -- over the prior year.
Cutting deforestation can fight climate change, reduce poverty and conflict (09/24/2008)
Forest conservation can play a critical role in efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and alleviate poverty, said a prominent group of politicians, development experts, and environmental NGOs meeting in New York City to discuss U.S. climate policy.
Future threats to the Amazon rainforest (07/31/2008)
Between June 2000 and June 2008, more than 150,000 square kilometers of rainforest were cleared in the Brazilian Amazon. While deforestation rates have slowed since 2004, forest loss is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. This is a look at past, current and potential future drivers of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
