By Cameron Tai
Slash and burn is a way people use to quickly flatten the land of its trees and expose the nutrient and water rich soil that is commonly found under large numbers of trees, like in rainforests. Then, they use this cleared land for purposes such as farming, making areas for cattle to graze, mining, making roads and for housing.
By burning the plants, it releases all the gasses, such as carbon dioxide. This can rapidly increase the rate of global warming as it releases many elements that were used by the plant, such as carbon dioxide. And global warming keeps speeding up, because as you burn up more plants, you are also losing leaves which turn Carbon Dioxide into oxygen.
The most notable case of slash and burn is the amazon rainforest. It was five times the size of Peru but now, it has lost almost 20% of its trees to farming, mining, wood logging and infrastructure projects. Today, the Amazon Rainforest is only four times the size of Peru. It is home to 40,000 plant species and approximately 10 million species of animals. But most importantly, it accounts for around 20% of the world’s photosynthesis. If we keep slashing and burning the amazon rainforest, within 100 years, it could be only half the size of the original rainforest before human civilisation started in South America.
When slash and burn occurs, the humidity can be massively impacted, and the air moisture reduced. This is because water is one of the ingredients in photosynthesis, and plants use it to their advantage, in order to make oxygen and glucose. Without the trees in a rainforest, the sun would evaporate all the water and leave the former rainforest extremely dry.
Slashing and burning land for clearance for farm usage is almost useless anyway, because the ash and tree embers that go into the ground bury the nutritional, water laden soil. Even after the ash and embers are cleared, the soil will not be as nutritious as it was when a rainforest was over it because there would be a lack of compost (fallen leaves from the trees above) for the soil to decompose.
In conclusion, we know slash and burn is destroying our forests and causes pollution when the burnt leaves release all the gasses that they used in the photosynthesis process.
2. http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/about_forests/deforestation/
Image Sources:
1. http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2012/01/31/jaguars-battling-in-the-darkness-sense-of-place-in-the-peruvian-amazon/peruvian-amazon-cut-2/
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