Trees - Gone in One Second!

You are wandering through a realm of green twilight, among the buttressed columns of trees that soar up to 15 stories overhead. Above you is a vast tangle of life, the densest, richest ecosphere on earth. The trees are festooned with vines hundreds or even thousands of feet [sometimes hundreds of meters] long and are wreathed with plants that anchor themselves all over the trunks and branches. Lush tropical blossoms scent the still hothouse air.

This is the tropical rain forest. But it is more than a beauty spot, more than vaulted corridors of misty forest shot through with shafts of light. It is a mechanism of incredible complexity whose parts work together with humming precision.

Life is profuse here, a variety unequaled elsewhere on the land surface of our planet. The rain forests take up only 6 percent of the earth's land area but have as much as half of all the plant and animal species. They produce about a third of all living material on the land. Far above you, the forest canopy is home to exotic insects and birds, to monkeys and other mammals. Most never come down to the ground at all. The trees feed and house them, and they in turn pollinate the trees or eat their fruits, scattering the seeds in their droppings.

Rains pour down daily, drenching the forests and fueling their elaborate cycle of life. Rain washes leaves and wastes down the trunks in a nutrient-rich soup that nourishes the plants called epiphytes that grow on the trees. The epiphytes in turn help the tree pull its main food, nitrogen, from the air. Many epiphytes have leafy "tanks" that hold gallons of water, creating little ponds high in the air that are habitats for tree frogs, salamanders, and birds.

Whatever nourishment reaches the forest floor is quickly devoured. Mammals, hordes of insects, and bacteria all work together to reduce nuts, animal carcasses, and foliage to the level of waste material. Then the floor itself eagerly receives it. If you were to brush away the debris at your feet, you would find a thick, spongy mat of white fibers, a network of roots and fungi. These fungi help the roots to absorb the nutrients rapidly, before the rains wash them away.

But now suppose your wandering through the rain forest was limited to a small section, an area about the size of an American football field. Suddenly, that whole section of forest vanishes. It is completely destroyed-in a single second! And as you watch in horror, the section next to yours, of the same size, is wiped out in the following second, and another in the next, and on and on. Finally, you stand alone on an empty plain, on earth baked hard under the glaring tropical sun.

According to some estimates, that is how fast the tropical rain forests of the world are being destroyed. Some put the rate even higher. According to Newsweek magazine, an area half the size of California is razed each year. Scientific American magazine of September 1989 calls it an area the size of Switzerland and the Netherlands combined.

But whatever the extent, the damage is appalling. Deforestation has raised a global furor, and it is focused largely on a single country.