Whatever happend to "save the rainforest?"?

Question

the deforestation of many of our greatest natural rain forest is still

going on at an alarming rate. why is everyone still ignoring this? Estimates of deforestation of tropical forest for the 1990s range from about 55,630 to 120,000 square kilometers each year. At this rate, all tropical forests may be gone by the year 2040.

Answer 1

Saving the Earth has become a much bigger problem at the moment, and part of saving the planet is also saving the rain forests.

Answer 2

After Sting stopped caring, the rest of the world see to follow his lead.

Answer 3

i dont know what people are thinking! they're all worried about like global warming and the world ending, but if they actually put forth into not having that happened, then we won't need to wrory about it! the people who actually do things to help out know that if they keep trying, the world can be saved!

Answer 4

It's the supply and demand of paper products, lumber, due to increases in population around the world,also economic changes occurring in India ,which GMP will be 7.9%  and China GMP at 10.5% .

Answer 5

dang thats actually kind of scary, i didn't know any of that, I think people haven't really paid attention to our eco system, because they are worried aboutbut our economy. Everyday gas prices are raising, rent is raising, price to buy a house is raising, food is getting more expencive and people are just trying to make that money so they can support their families, so thats what i think, that people are not worried about what is going on around them, but what is going on with them, when actually we should be worried about everything else because everything else is what is keeping are world together. I hope I'm making sense here. I hope this is one of the answers to your question :o)

Answer 6

Our Wonderful Politicians decided to throw another wrench in the machine and divert our attentions else where...

But, I wouldnt expect anything else from those wonderful people...

Now back to my "Humans are like Locusts" hypothesis...

Answer 7

because the companies deforesting the rainforest now have something else to cover them up, GLOBAL WARMING.

Answer 8

I am irritated with people too! Why ARE people ignoring the rainforest?! I think it is because of Global Warming and just the idea of a faster more up beat lifestyle. People don't care anymore, it makes me sick! What people don't understand is that if there were no conservation or activism, this world would be gone by now!

P.S. Believe me I know what I am talking about! I am a Wild Mustang activist, and people ignore me ALL of the time.

Answer 9

Because the liberal press is too busy scaring the public with 'global warming' now, which sells more news!

Answer 10

Most people only care about the things that are going on in their neighborhood. So if it's that far away, most people don't care. Even though the rainforests have tons of wildlife yet to be discovered, and flora and fauna that may be the answer to some of the diseases that we face today. But the world has moved on to different things. It's sad really.

Answer 11

It just may be that people in this country are too insucure about their lives to worry about anything else beyond them. I mean the average american job security is limited at best,wether U even have a job in the first place.Not to forget the thousands of credit card debt everyone seems to owe the creditors now.How can one really worry about something so abstact,so far away,when U even can't feed your family properly in the meantime,just a thought!

Answer 12

Given our corporate culture, most of the efforts now are focused on raising capital to "buy up" the land for preservation instead of fighting politically.  

There is good progress being made, but by the very nature of democratizing ownership to local control, the publicity and involvement is also up to people, like you and me.  The movement is toward independent action, and that's why you don't hear as much about it.  There are so many groups and foundations working on separate cases, you have to search online to see which people are working on what areas.

Here are two highly successful foundations:

(1) Rainforest Foundation (UK and US)

http://www.rainforestfoundation.org

Sting has held concerts, featuring Madonna and Tina Turner, to raise funds and awareness about saving rainforests across Africa and South America.  He works locally, with indigenous people, to try to organize support to stop logging roads from being plowed through prime forest lands.

(2) Conservation International

http://www.conservation.org

Harrison Ford has worked with major corporations to secure contiguous tracts of land, in order to preserve a migration path for wildlife across the American continents.

(3) Land trusts such as LTA, the Forest Trust, and Pacific Forest Trust, form alliances among public and private interests to try to protect and/or purchase forest land for preservation.

To get more grassroots people involved, and to push for preservation fundraising through the mainstream media,

I am launching a "Rock the Earth" music campaign for the environment.  The focus is to buy up and preserve endangered redwoods and wildlife in the Headwaters Forest, including a rainforest ecosystem, as a national memorial.  Previously, the U.S. Government cut a deal with the controlling corporation to preserve major portions of the forest land.  But environmental researchers showed that this was not enough to secure the whole ecosystem, due to migratory and issues of interrelated species, where the balance is still being destroyed unless the whole forest is protected. http://www.houstonprogressive.org/songbo...

Overall, I agree that the media has misdirected too much attention to "global warming" to profit off controversy and conflict, and has not focused on promoting solutions and common points that everyone agrees are good goals.

So I want to promote a positive approach, setting environment lyrics to popular rock music that will catch media attention and direct it toward solutions.  Again, because of our capitalistic "free market" economy, the solutions that everyone agrees on involve buying up the land in question for groups to pursue preservation efforts, and to quit relying on government regulations that cannot be enforced anyway due to corporate influence on elected politicians.  While people argue over campaign finance reform, the trees and wildlife are dying.  So we would save more resources by buying out the companies and land, instead of wasting time and money fighting politically in a no-win situation.

With Headwaters Forest, it would cost an estimated $200 million to buy out controlling shares of the parent corporation, so the land can be managed in a sustainable way, as it was before under the original company.  This is 1/2 to 1/3 the cost of trying to buy the remaining unprotected land.

Otherwise, when there are urgent demands to save so many endangered forests areas, the limited resources tend to be focused on the most urgent cases. Unless environmentalists buy out the land or the companies, wilderness is destroyed by profit-driven logging to yield the maximum capital in a short amount of time, such as clear-cutting into forest ecosystems, instead of sustainable logging of renewable trees grown and harvested like other crops.

Answer 13

Because it's hard to save something that hasn't happened yet or that people can't see. People are actually being affected by the FACT of global warming and so more people are taking notice of that and demanding action.  Deforestation and the destruction of critical ecosystems (ie. wetlands) - not just the rain forest- lead to the overall unbalanced world that we are moving towards.  Example is the way that New Orleans and some of the other coastal areas are affected by hurricanes.  Wetlands are natural buffers in place to protect the area from those storms - but we have spent the last 30+ years filling them in and building/farming on them.  If people were aware of this balance, and cared, maybe we could shift our thinking to conservation and management.  Nothing is ever going to change until we can make the shift to what is good for everyone - not just ME right now.  It all starts with education and awareness.  With out changing the way the world treats the Earth - then global warming will just be the beginning of the problems we will have to face.

Answer 14

It's all 'global warming' now because this is thought of as a bigger problem because it will effect the human forestation.

Whereas the rainforest is an 'out of sight, out of mind' thing, there are still thousands of petition's against deforestation.

Answer 15

There is a new global emergency every few years. Something happens and people just forget for a while until a powerful figure brings it up again. There are alot of changes we need to make or our planet will end up looking worse than Mars. And we will all be screwed.