Brandi Long Environmental Science-204 July 12, 2012 I-Lab#1 Deforestation

Exercise 1
Discuss 5 products that come from tropical rain forests. A lot of the ingrediants that make of medication that is used in today’s world come from tropical rain forests, like Lapacho (Pav D’ arco). This is used for chemotherapy medicine for patients that have cancer. Lapacho has been noted to be beneficial for other conditions, like bacteria, viruses, parasites, arthritis and fungi. In fact, 70% of the plants used for anti-cancer drugs can only be found in the tropical rain forests. About 7% of paper pulp used to produce paper comes from the tropical rain forests. Mahogany and teak wood that is used for making furniture comes from the trees growing in the tropical rain forest. All the passion fruits used in the ingredients for shampoo all come from the tropical forest. Vanillas that are used for cooking and baking are from vanilla seed pods from the vanilla orchid grown in the tropical rain forest.

Exercise 2
Discuss 5 major causes of deforestation. As the population grows world-wide, more volume is needed, like our food supply. Farmers will deforestation land to raise cattle, for meat. This would cause some deforestation from the cattle grazing. Workers go and lumber the trees so the wood could be used for materials; like paper. Creating roadways, whether for travel by vehicles and railroads they would need to clear land, the railroads are used to import and/or export goods from region to region. Some deforestation would happen by accident by control fires becoming out of control and in some cases, fires that were accidental by burning wood. In Western Brazil, harvesting of soybeans make up for the cause of their deforestation, they have to clear land to harvest this and use machinery to transport it from the area.