Roaming Gnome’s Blog

When I looked at the assignment this is what I saw:

The best way to participate is to post on your blog something that relates to the environment. Your post can be about anything to do with the environment. So you could write a post which is off topic for your blog OR relate the environment back to your topic in some way.

I thought that it was going be something that would take a few minutes because I didn’t think I would be that interested in this topic. What I found out about the Rainforest was very amazing in a bad way.

 So here are some facts:

• Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth, now they cover 6%
• 1 1/2 acres of rainforests are destroyed every second!
• Estimate show that we are losing 137 plant and animal species every day due to rainforest devastation.
• If you multiply that times 365 you get around 50,005 Species PER YEAR that are gone forever
• Five centuries ago there were about 10 million native Indians living in the Amazon rainforest now there are only about 200,000
• Just in Brazil European colonists have destroyed  more than 90 indigenous tribes
• When the medicine man of a certain tribe dies without passing knowledge on to another generation, it is like losing thousands of years of medicinal plants and survival techniques.
• Sometimes described as the lungs of our planet, the rainforest provides us with 20% of the earths oxygen
• The Amazon rainforest alone makes up for a quarter of the entire bird species, imagine if that were destroyed,
• Nearly half of all plants, animals, or microorganisms will become extinct or endangered in the next quarter of a century due to rainforest deforestation.

Are you as disgusted as I am?