A Word of Caution About Rainforest Alarmists
Rainforest alarmists never point out that loss figures for tropical forests are deducted from a gigantic base. The Amazon rainforest covers about 1.7 million square miles, almost two-thirds the size of the 48 states. Even after a decade of determined burning at least four-fifths of this wilderness, an area larger than the United States east of the Mississippi, still stands primal and pristine. Amazonia is so expansive and so lightly if clumsily touched by the human hand that stretches of the region dozens of miles in length remain nearly uncharted.

During the late 1980's, when reporters traveled to Amazonia to produce stories suggesting the entire region was on fire, dispatches contained a significant distortion. There are only a handful of highways in the Amazon, most in the state of Rondonia. When reporters drove those highways they saw columns of smoke in every direction; it seemed to them the entire tropics was ablaze. But land-clearing projects concentrate along roads, for the obvious reasons. Back in the vastness of the jungle fires were rare. Not venturing far from their Land Rovers, reporters did not see this. Easterbrook, Gregg. Photo: PhotoDisc Inc.

[ Slash & Burn Agriculture ] [ From the Seat of the Bulldozer ]  [ Regrowth in the Amazon ] 
[ Data Collection in the Amazon ] [ Colonization of the Rainforest ] 
[ Loving the Rainforest to Death ] [ Frogs in the Rainforest ]
 [ Tropical Deforestation & Habitat Destruction ]
[ The Importance of Forests & the Perils of Deforestation ] [ Hamburgers in the Rainforest ]
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