Amazon Rainforest
From Wikislippy
The Amazon Rainforest (now known as the Amazon Desert) is located in Brazil, South America.
[edit] Origins
The Amazon Rainforest was a moist broadleaf forest in the Amazon Basin of South America. The area encompasses seven million square kilometers (1.2 billion acres), though the forest itself occupied some 5.5 million square kilometers, located within nine nations: Brazil (with 60 percent of the rainforest), Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. States or departments in four nations bear the name Amazonas after it. The Amazon represented over half of the planet's rainforests and comprised the largest and most species-rich tract of tropical rainforest in the world.
[edit] From Rainforest To Deset
The Amazon Desert is a result of severe deforestation. Deforestation is the conversion of forested areas to non-forested areas. The main sources of deforestation in the Amazon are human settlement and development of the land.
The majority of the deforestation was caused by livestock raising. Farmers would move into a new forested area and need room for the cows. So he burns half the forest down, killing all the trees and making room for the cows. The cows five on the new land and eat all the grass. This turns the once forest into a desert and is no longer useful to the farmer. So he packs up and moves to a new patch of the forest and repeats the process over and over. The old land is now a desert and useless and all the nutrients are gone. Who buys these cows? Probably MacDonald's and Wal-Mart. Cleared property is also valued 5–10 times more than forested land.
