DEFORESTATION

By: Marifer Murillo

Hello, everyone! My name is Marifer and I am a 6th grade student from Managua. I am really glad to talk to you about a really important problem that is affecting our world a lot.

Have you ever thought about why animals are going extinct? Well one of the reasons is deforestation. Deforestation is killing many animals and it is taking away many of the homes where animals live in. Cutting trees is affecting a lot of nature’s life. Do you think our world would be better without trees? I think not.

What can we do to stop this problem? Well there are many ways. One of them is to do the obvious, recycle. We can recycle by using less paper at school and at work. We can recycle by using both sides of the paper. Another way to recycle is that kids can build anything they desire with paper for example kids can use scrap paper to draw or they can simply be creative.

Why is recycling important? Well, recycling is important because it helps save trees which trees take an important role in our world. Trees give us oxygen and it is home to many animals. But the more paper we use the more trees get cut down. So, recycling is important because it helps save the animals’ homes. If we recycle we will have a world full of trees like it has to be and animals will have their homes again.

What do I think about this? I think that helping our environment is a great idea because it gives us a chance to see how the world should look like when we don’t cut trees. I also think that taking care of our environment is great because it shows that we are thankful about what nature is giving to us. This is a good idea because some of the causes of deforestation are logging, which is cutting the trees, mining, which is to obtain coal, oil and gas extraction which is a part of mining and we can stop all this from causing deforestation.

Here’s a little information about this problem. According to United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, an estimated 18 million acres of forest, which is roughly the size of the country of Panama, are lost each year. Every second more than 1,000 trees are being cut down. If you enter any website such as, www.worldcounts.com, that counts down how many trees are being cut down, the countdown keeps increasing and increasing. Wow, every minute, forests that are the size of 20 football fields are being cut down. Way before we started to build cities 60% of the Earth was covered in forests, now 10% of the Earth is covered in forests because of how many trees and forests we’ve destroyed. Just so you know, if we continue to cut down forests, there will be no forests in 100 years. Do you really want to have a world without trees?