chomp.
The past few nights have been somewhat sleep deprived, and I've had quite the long eventful day as well, needless to say I have not been quite this tired in about a year. My stomache has been on the rocks lately, and I do not believe that the indian food I consumed for lunch while visitting granville island really helped. Unfortunately I have recently procured for myself in the past 15 minutes a bowl of stirfry on noodles, a handful of organic tortilla chips, a glass of ice water, and a tupperware bowl with an orange popsicle in it- probably because orange popsicles are the shit. I do not think this food mix will help, however the tortilla chips may help my nausea..?
This part really has very little to do with my personal life, but I feel very strongly about the rainforest and everything it has to offer even if I have only been able to witness a small section of it in reality. I personally think that this is pretty informative, however I suppose that depends upon the person and I may be biased.. But here is my "rant" persay, they get a lot of this at work so livejournal may as well also..
At one time 14% of the world was covered by the rainforest, this percentage has been pushed down to 6%, a 6% that may be a 0% in another 40 years to come. Many people view the rainforests for only their perceieved land value in the timber of which can be derived from it, since the dream of using the ever so fertile lands of the rainforest really died when people figured out that the soil of the rainforest has a lack of fertility when it is really the forest's canopy that is fertile. Brazil's military government had to figure out the difficult way that rainforest land was not suited for the likes of farming when they developed their colonization plan to move the poverty from the larger coastal cities into the wilderness of the forests.
Cattle ranches are the other major cause of rainforest destruction, ranchers slash and burn achres of forest in order to provide grazing land for their cattle. (In the 90's when this became a big deal McDonalds claimed that their beef did not come out of the rainforests, you can decide if you believe them or not) but there lays an estimation that for every 4oz. hamburger we consume in industrialized countries we are depleting the world of 55 square feet of rainforest. It is almost as though we are "eatting through the rainforest".
Now I am really quite sleepy and headachy and going to bed but I am going to leave with this part that I did not write but got directly off of a website because it involved too many numbers for my memory to retain.. Honestly though I could probably write a 25 page paper on this so I must stop.
Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases. Currently, 121 prescription drugs sold worldwide come from plant-derived sources. While 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less that 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists. In Brazil alone, European colonists have destroyed more than 90 indigenous tribes since the 1900's. With them have gone centuries of accumulated knowledge of the medicinal value of rainforest species. As their homelands continue to be destroyed by deforestation, rainforest peoples are also disappearing.
music Kissing The Lipless - The Shins