What Do Forests, Trees, Paper and Chocolate Have to Do With Recycling?
John Woolf
Professional Writer | SEO Content Creator | Marketing Specialist | Animal Advocate
From the Ivory Coast to Brazil and Sumatra: Our Unyielding Tastes May be Our Demise
The Amazing Truth About Trees
Trees are truly amazing. Never dying of old age, trees can reduce soundwaves, lower stress and absorb carbon dioxide — CO2. Trees can increase a person’s pain tolerance, lower blood pressure and limit anxiety by releasing chemicals called phytoncides. Aside from the obvious beauty they lend to your landscape, trees are a critical part of the earth’s infrastructure — vital for humans’ survival.
Studies show that every mature tree produces enough oxygen for three people to breathe. It does this by absorbing forty-eight pounds of carbon dioxide every year. That seems kind of important, wouldn’t you agree? Yet, people have cut down over a billion hectares of forest in only forty years. That’s a landmass area larger than China. And we deforest an area the size of the Netherlands every day just to make paper products.?
Responsible forestry does happen, and several organizations have garnered victories worldwide, but the relentless march toward the fail-safe line continues. The Amazon rainforest is disappearing at an alarming rate, and forecasts predict twenty-seven percent of the Amazon will be without trees by 2030. We’re getting close to no return in Brazil, and one look at the Ivory Coast and parts of Ghana, West Africa, shows a desiccated landscape where green, lush rainforest once stood. And if you look at the island of Sumatra in Indonesia — just a little larger than California — you’ll see a dwindling rainforest and a CO2 output behind only the USA and China.?
The time to step up is now.
Deforestation of Our Future
Among the leaders in causes of climate change and global warming, deforestation is the least discussed among today’s pundits. The oceans’ temperatures and ice floats in the arctic poles are all the rage. Trees are an afterthought. But deforestation means rising CO2, less filtered rainwater, soil erosion, and decreased oxygen for all land animals — including the alpha humans.
Whether soy in Brazil, cocoa beans harvested in the Ivory Coast of Africa or paper products from the rainforests of Sumatra, crops to meet our needs, greed and desires are slowly killing the planet. The earth was once fourteen percent rainforest; now it stands at six percent and falling. Here are several statistics to further illustrate the growing problem:
But It’s Not ALL About Paper
When you read the words Hershey’s, Nestle or Mars, does your mouth salivate for the sweet, creamy texture of chocolate? Mine does. Chocolate comes from cocoa which, in turn, comes from cocoa (cacao) beans harvested from the Theobroma Cacao tree. And the Theombra Cacao tree needs somewhere to grow. Somewhere sunny but with a lot of taller trees to shade it. And heat. In fact, the Theombra enjoys growing in a tropical climate (twenty degrees on either side of the equator). That’s limited territory. It’s also rainforest territory — especially along the western coast of Africa, where Portuguese traders introduced it in 1822.
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It’s estimated that over eighty percent of the rainforests of the Ivory Coast, Africa, are gone. What started with a deluge of homeless families fleeing war and famine, looking for a chance to live, resulted in a crisis of global proportions. As agricultural people, these refugees started chopping down the forest and clearing land for planting the Theombra Cacao trees. Now, the Ivory Coast — no larger than the state of New Mexico — produces one-third of the world’s cacao, or cocoa, supply.
Cocoa production and deforestation go hand-in-hand. The government of the Ivory Coast, whether to solve the problem or increase revenues, is removing protection from the national parks and other rainforests and allowing big chocolate traders to oversee these crops. Will it work? The deforestation facts speak for themselves, and the answer is complicated. Only time will tell.
While cocoa production is catching up to the world’s insatiable hunger for chocolate, many species of primates, elephants and other wildlife suffer the consequences. But so do the hundreds of small farmers who either accept the new way of doing business or lose everything. The numbers don’t lie:
The Leading Causes of Global Warming
The four leading causes of global warming come in at around twenty-five percent each.?
Global warming, by definition, is the long-term heating of the earth’s surface and the planet’s overall temperature. Extensive rainforests, like the Amazon, release moisture into the world, creating atmospheric rivers that regulate our planet’s weather patterns. And trees suck up CO2 like a sponge. Removing trees increases global temperature, causes soil erosion, flooding, fewer sustainable crops and many other problems.
Recycling: A Global Priority, A Personal Responsibility
Our recycling efforts may seem small on a per-family or individual basis, but when taken together, they add up to a sum greater than the parts. When we recycle plastics, decide not to print out that email, drive fewer unnecessary miles or eat less chocolate, we play our role in the tremendous global theater company.?
The Bible’s King David was said to have served God in his generation. We can serve our children and our children’s children in this generation by leaving a smaller footprint on the earth through the little things we do every day to recycle products, lower fossil fuel consumption or choose to turn off lights.
If we don't, the earth may turn off the lights for us all.