Gone Bananas

The "lungs of the Earth" are having trouble breathing. As World Rainforest Week kicks off, consumers should take a stand at the register

Rainforests once covered 14 percent of the Earth's land surface. Today, they cover only 6 percent.

More than half of the world's estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects live in tropical rainforests. But not for long: One-and-a-half acres of rainforest are lost every second.

Prince Charles has called for an end to the deforestation of the planet's rainforests, citing it as the best solution to combating climate change. These trees stores vast amounts of carbon, which is released into the atmosphere when they are cut down.

And they are being cut down at alarming rates (Argentina recently announced that it has lost almost 70% of its forests in the last hundred years) in order to make a wide variety of products, such as tropical hardwood, beef, bananas, coffee, chocolate, paper, aluminum, gold, oil, palm oil and steel.

In May of last year, the prince told the BBC that rainforests are the world's "air conditioning system," adding that it was "crazy" the rainforests were worth more "dead than alive" to some of the world's poorest people.

"Halting deforestation would be the easiest and cheapest way in helping in the battle against climate change," he said.

With a recent study showing that the United States must cut carbon within a decade, consumer choice can be a powerful tool for change in the coming years.

The banana is "the most popular fruit in the world...responsible for massive degradation of the land, chemicalization, worker poisoning and oppression," according to RainforestRelief.org.

"Currently, no fresh banana available in the US is grown in a way that is not detrimental to the rainforests."

As World Rainforest Week kicks off today, perhaps consumers -- when comparing apples and bananas -- will choose the one that allows the world's trees to breathe a little easier.

GET INVOLVED

• Download a PDF of "Do I Dare Eat That Banana," a document created by RainforestRelief.org that outlines rainforest products to avoid
  
• Participate in World Rainforest Week
  
• Protect an acre of rainforest through Conservation International
• Donate to the Rainforest Action Network
• Take these seven steps to help save the Amazon rainforest

RELATED POSTS

• Don't Cry for Trees Argentina (September 28, 2009)
• Prince Charles Urges Halt to Rainforest Logging (May 20, 2008)
• Happy Markets, Happy Forests (April 27, 2008)
• Plight of the Penan (September 14, 2009)
• Lost World (September 9, 2009)
• The Trees of the Maya (July 29, 2009)
• Environmental Showdown in the Amazon: Big Oil vs. Native People (July 21, 2009)
• The Rare Animals of the Amazon (June 13, 2009)
• Trade Carbon, Save Orangutans (June 8, 2009)
  
• Hey You, Get Off of My Cloud (May 30, 2009)
• Blowing Noses Into Dead, Ancient Trees (February 29, 2009)
  
• Dismembering the Earth's Heart and Lungs (January 25, 2009)

image: "The state of Rondônia in western Brazil is one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon. In the past three decades, clearing and degradation of the state’s original 208,000 square kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres, an area slightly smaller than the state of Kansas) has been rapid: 4,200 square kilometers cleared by 1978; 30,000 by 1988; and 53,300 by 1998. By 2003, an estimated 67,764 square kilometers of rainforest—an area larger than the state of West Virginia—had been cleared.

"By the beginning of this decade, the frontier had reached the remote northwest corner of Rondônia, pictured in this series of images from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite. Intact forest is deep green, while cleared areas are tan (bare ground) or light green (crops, pasture, or occasionally, second-growth forest). Over the span of eight years, roads and clearings pushed west-northwest from Buritis toward the Jaciparaná River. The deforested area along the road into Nova Mamoré expanded north-northeast all the way to the BR-346 highway.

"Deforestation follows a fairly predictable pattern in these images. The first clearings that appear in the forest are in a fishbone pattern, arrayed along the edges of roads. Over time, the fishbones collapse into a mixture of forest remnants, cleared areas, and settlements. This pattern follows one of the most common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. Legal and illegal roads penetrate a remote part of the forest, and small farmers migrate to the area. They claim land along the road and clear some of it for crops. Within a few years, heavy rains and erosion deplete the soil, and crop yields fall. Farmers then convert the degraded land to cattle pasture, and clear more forest for crops. Eventually the small land holders, having cleared much of their land, sell it or abandon it to large cattle holders, who consolidate the plots into large areas of pasture." (credit: NASA)