The black widow is loved by the male, who in his last pleasant moments ignores his immediate future. Finished the rite of love, the female sticks her poisonous sting in him and the unhappy lover falls to the ground on the spot. There is no scientific explanation for such strange and unnatural behavior.
We humans are lovers of wood, and we are more and more so. To obtain it, we compulsively cut down the forests. Like the Latrodectus mactans couple, the widow's scientific name, we are unaware of our act and of the future that awaits us if we continue with the hostile predation of the forests.
We recognize that the analogy is extremely harsh, but we consider it necessary to raise awareness, purpose and motto for our outreach work. The good news is that the difference between the unfortunate male arachnid and Homo sapiens is that we still have time to fully understand the problem and demand that the looting of the forests stop. The bad news is related to the new threats looming over the Amazon rainforest.
Due to our love for wood and the increasing commercialization of the world's forests, we have to be very clear that the problem is not easy to solve. Our love for wood is eternal and ancestral. Already in the Paleolithic, houses were made of wooden logs 28 thousand years ago. But it was in the 20th century that the addiction to wood took hold, especially after the conclusion of World War II, and has continued with greater momentum in this unpredictable 21st century, which has changed our lives. From 1945 until today the world population has multiplied by almost four, going from two billion to 7.5 billion inhabitants. A fact that undoubtedly affects the forest systems of the planet, which represent much more than trees, biomes and ecosystems, as we will see later.
China is the world's largest consumer of timber, not only because of its huge population but because it has been joined by several million millionaires in recent decades. If we stick to the import figures from the Asian country, these new players must love the tongue-and-groove ceilings, the floors and stairs made of thick wood, the furniture and bars made of precious wood and other items made from the excellent vegetable pulp.
But also in other parts of the world the love for wood has exploded and consumers of boards, planks, beams, columns, slats, railings, parquet and window frames made from the heart and fiber of noble trees have multiplied.
Eliminating the addiction to wood is a complex matter since it is not only used for pleasure but by necessity. For now, wood has no substitute except for iron, bronze, other metals, plastics, granite stones or marble.
The warmth of wood, its texture and beauty is not provided by any other material, and that is why it lets us fall in love with ease. But the love of wood is a very dangerous love.
What would life be like without forests?
The love of wood has led to an increase in forest marketing, despite the fact that the Earth's vegetation cover is among the list of nine limits of the planet, drawn up by the Stockholm Resilience Center, between 2009 and 2015. According to this institution it would be It is extremely dangerous to cross these limits, but four have already crossed that border. The vegetation cover, included among these, refers especially to forests, tropical jungles and other green areas of the planet.
Another data to take into account is the "Earth System", a science that encompasses chemistry, physics, biology, mathematics. It was created to try to understand our planet as an integrated system through physical, chemical, biological and human interactions that determine the past, present and future states of the Earth.
A forest, for the benefit of your understanding, could be considered as a component or organ of the Earth system. Therefore, like any organ, a forest has an anatomy and a physiology. The first refers to its shape, structure and the biotic and abiotic components that make it up. As for the second, it deals with the functioning of the system and its interrelation with other media outside its limits.
The physiology of the forest serves itself in the first place, through the generation of the water cycle, whose first beneficiary is the forest itself, due to the rainfall of the vital liquid it receives. Second, such operation is beneficial for other regions, some of them hundreds and even thousands of kilometers away.In the case of the Amazon, the evaporation of water produced by the largest rainforest on the planet is vital to irrigate the Andes mountains in almost their entire extension. For this reason the hostile deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, the lung of the world, is very dangerous. A fewer number of trees corresponds to less cloud formation and rain. As a consequence, the humidity and flow of rivers decrease. If the droughts are prolonged, we would witness permanent fires and new deserts, the numbers and extensions of which will depend on how hostile the logging of the forest is. Humanity already has a clear experience of all this in the disaster that occurred in the Borneo jungle.
But the water cycle is not the only function of forests. Trees produce oxygen, vital for most species, and in turn absorb carbon dioxide, CO2, the major cause of global warming. During photosynthesis, a process carried out by trees and the vast majority of plants, they absorb and store CO2, which is fixed in their roots, trunks and leaves in the form of carbon. Plants, although they take oxygen from the air and re-enter carbon dioxide, the bottom line is positive in favor of the extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide absorption capacity is directly proportional to the size, density and quantity of plants and trees present in a forest.
But ultimately, the deforestation of forests would affect the Earth system itself, becoming the first contributor to the planet's climate change and the extinction of species. To assert this, we are based on the fact that no plan to replace wood with other materials is in sight. There is also no known effective action to prevent illegal logging, or a schedule to reduce forest marketing, as there are for the replacement of fossil fuels with clean energies.
In some countries, programs to withdraw internal combustion cars from automotive circulation are already well advanced. The production of photovoltaic solar panels, wind mills and lithium batteries for electric cars is on the rise. Almost all vehicle manufacturers are already producing silent, non-polluting plug-in cars that are heading in the right direction of the Paris Agreement. This is why we say that tree felling is a more acute problem than the emission of greenhouse gases itself. Without forests there is no life.
________________
To learn more about the author visit:
Web: SGK-PLANET Sowing climate awareness
Twitter: SGK-PLANET-en and SGK-PLANET-es
Facebook and Books and Climate by Sandor Alejandro Gerendas-Kiss
LinkedIn and Instagram
