Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz

Deforestation - Illustrated Quote
“Earth Skinned Alive”

Amazon Burning Background - Medium (500 x 350 px)

More Deforestation quotes >>

Click here or image for larger picture

Deforestation of Amazon forest by burning to clear for grazing lands.
Credit: NASA LBA-ECO Project

“Earth, Skinned Alive” was the headline for a book review in the New York Times (1991)

Deforestation in the Amazon has taken place mainly in Brazil, where already about 20 percent of that country's Amazon rainforest has been destroyed. If felled trees and vegetation is left to rot, the carbon content of the formerly living matter will inevitably be converted to carbon dioxide. Fires used to clear the tree trunks, stumps and roots to make cropland produce the carbon dioxide more quickly. About 75 percent of Brazil's emissions result from rainforest clearing, amounting to an estimated 400 million tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year. That makes Brazil at least the sixth-biggest contributor to the world's accumulation of that greenhouse gas.

Since 2000, as improved highway infrastructure facilitates moving timber out from illegal logging, and rising food prices stimulate clearing for mechanized crop farming and pastures for cattle, the government has struggled to balance the competing pressures of conservation and economic needs. In 2009, the then president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was outspoken about the developed nations:

“I don't want any gringo asking us to let an Amazon resident die of hunger under a tree. We want to preserve, but they will have to pay the price for this preservation because we never destroyed our forest like they mowed theirs down a century ago.”

What remains clear, is that razing of thousands of square miles of forests, whether in Brazil or a number of other countries, raises the amount of carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere, and significantly reduces the amount of plant life able to to remove it.

(source)

“Earth, Skinned Alive.”

— Book review headline

From Stephen J. Pyne in New York Times (21 Apr 1991), BR19. (The book being reviewed was Kenton Miller and Laura Tangley, Trees of Life: Saving Tropical Forests and Their Biological Wealth.)

(click for more about this quote and a larger picture • 500px • 800px)

(source)

Edward O. Wilson Illustrated Quote on Destroying Rainforest >>

Nature bears long with those who wrong her. She is patient under abuse. But when abuse has gone too far, when the time of reckoning finally comes, she is equally slow to be appeased and to turn away her wrath. (1882) -- Nathaniel Egleston, who was writing then about deforestation, but speaks equally well about the danger of climate change today.

Carl Sagan: In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) ...(more by Sagan)

Albert Einstein: I used to wonder how it comes about that the electron is negative. Negative-positive—these are perfectly symmetric in physics. There is no reason whatever to prefer one to the other. Then why is the electron negative? I thought about this for a long time and at last all I could think was “It won the fight!” ...(more by Einstein)

Richard Feynman: It is the facts that matter, not the proofs. Physics can progress without the proofs, but we can't go on without the facts ... if the facts are right, then the proofs are a matter of playing around with the algebra correctly. ...(more by Feynman)