Raziaar
I Hate Custom Titles
- Joined
- Sep 13, 2003
- Messages
- 29,769
- Reaction score
- 140
In forty years, I believe it is estimated that we will have exhausted all the available oil in the ground to be had. Some people view this as being catastrophic and perhaps affecting mankind in more ways than we can count if we do not get off our dependency of oil.
It seems to be the big topic of discussion, the most contentious event plaguing us as a combined species. At least, that's the way the media makes it sound.
The second big topic of discussion, is Global Warming. Sure, this is a big issue. Dramatically changing weather patterns. Melting of the ice caps, rising levels of the ocean. This will undoubtedly have some significant impact on us in 40 years, when things become much worse.
The thing that concerns me most though, oddly enough, is the disappearance of every single rainforest on earth in 30-40 years. I read a statistic that rain forests are losing 1 acre every second. Every second we lose an entire acre of rainforest. Most of us live on properties that are less than an acre large, and it may seem small to you, but just do the calculations.
I did the calculations, and there are a little over 31 million seconds in every year. Extend this out a bit using the number of acres the Brazilian rain forest contains, which is only a mere 1.2 billion acres, and we see the complete loss of the rain forest at the current rate in under 40 years. Let alone the other rain forests of the world.
I can only see this rate of decrease increasing over the years, as populations continue to grow and demand for real estate increases.
When you stop to think about everything we as a modern society derive from the rain forest and can derive from it for future medical advances, it begins to become scary, very scary. And it saddens me that rain forest preservation seems to be a side issue these days, less important than terrorism, less important than the oil crisis.
I'm sure people will be singing a different tune once we get that far along... but most politicians today won't even have to be around to deal with those consequences.
I voted rainforest depletion. Why? Because at least we're getting more proactive about changing that fate... but we continue to let our rain forests die.
It seems to be the big topic of discussion, the most contentious event plaguing us as a combined species. At least, that's the way the media makes it sound.
The second big topic of discussion, is Global Warming. Sure, this is a big issue. Dramatically changing weather patterns. Melting of the ice caps, rising levels of the ocean. This will undoubtedly have some significant impact on us in 40 years, when things become much worse.
The thing that concerns me most though, oddly enough, is the disappearance of every single rainforest on earth in 30-40 years. I read a statistic that rain forests are losing 1 acre every second. Every second we lose an entire acre of rainforest. Most of us live on properties that are less than an acre large, and it may seem small to you, but just do the calculations.
I did the calculations, and there are a little over 31 million seconds in every year. Extend this out a bit using the number of acres the Brazilian rain forest contains, which is only a mere 1.2 billion acres, and we see the complete loss of the rain forest at the current rate in under 40 years. Let alone the other rain forests of the world.
I can only see this rate of decrease increasing over the years, as populations continue to grow and demand for real estate increases.
When you stop to think about everything we as a modern society derive from the rain forest and can derive from it for future medical advances, it begins to become scary, very scary. And it saddens me that rain forest preservation seems to be a side issue these days, less important than terrorism, less important than the oil crisis.
I'm sure people will be singing a different tune once we get that far along... but most politicians today won't even have to be around to deal with those consequences.
I voted rainforest depletion. Why? Because at least we're getting more proactive about changing that fate... but we continue to let our rain forests die.
