Hellish Machines that Are Tearing Down the Forests
The rainforest is the world’s last frontier. Everyday, thousands of acres are being destroyed to suit the world’s living needs. Without taking into consideration what may happen to the world and our future. People are stripping away a place where special plants and animals live. Animals and plants of the rainforest can only live in their environment the way it is now. We must strive as a whole to stop deforestation for the survival of plants, animals, and us.
Logging trees out of the rainforest has become a major issue today. Loggers as well as the companies that need these enormous trees are making a lot of money. After the trees are logged out, the land is then turned over to the farmers for cattle grazing. The land cannot sustain this torture. An exhausted land can no longer produce enough grass for cattle to graze. Without these tremendous trees, we face the consequences of the green house effect. Even when trees are cut and being burned, they release carbon into the atmosphere. This is the second largest factor contributing to the green house effect. With the rising of carbon levels, temperatures around the world are rising along with the breakdown of the ozone layer. Deforestation will lead us to the end of all civilizations. Their survival is our survival.
Rainforests have more biodiversity (by far) than any other life zone on Earth, and yet they are being cut down globally at anywhere from 560 to 9,000 acres an hour. In the U.S., where the modern logging industry has invested more in replanting trees to help guarantee timber supplies for the future (as opposed to the slash and burn degradation of forest land common in the tropics), forests today still only cover about 70 percent of their former range according to the most optimistic estimates, while only six percent of U.S. forest land is more than 175 years old. In other words, 94 percent of our current timber reserves have been axed at one point or another in our nation’s history.
But at the same time, we still need lumber to build our houses and paper to wipe our asses. Harping on the big business of logging and cattle raising – the reason the rainforest is being burned is so McDonald’s can have beef – isn’t going to stop anyone from obliterating the world’s fresh air supply and erasing 27,000 species off the planet (forever) every year. So rather than complain about the death of stately American trees and the conversion of the Amazon into low-quality grazing land for cut-rate heifers, let’s take a look at some of the bad-ass equipment loggers get to use and rank them on how scary they are on a scale of “Kinda Cute” to “Indescribably Nightmarish.”
