Glenn Hurowitz in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel: Floridians don't have to look much farther than high air conditioning bills and disappearing beaches to see how climate change is already threatening the state's economy. But when it comes to solving this crisis, we can't look just at common sense local steps like installing solar panels or using mass transit. Because the truth is that actions we take affecting the tropical rainforests of Brazil, Indonesia, and Congo may have as much impact on the state's well being as what we do here at home.
These forests are the lungs of the Earth - they breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. But they are being burned and cleared at a frightening pace by illegal overseas timber and agriculture operations that want to turn these tropical paradises into cattle ranches, and soy and palm oil plantations to sell agricultural commodities on the world market.
That burning sends enormous amounts of pollution into the atmosphere - more pollution than all the cars, trucks, ships and planes in the world combined. And those agricultural commodities, created at such an enormous cost to the climate and the inhabitants of the forest, undercut more sustainably and responsibly produced U.S. products. Indeed, a forthcoming study shows that left unchecked, deforestation will cost Florida timber and agriculture between $4 billion and $6 billion. With many Florida farmers and timberland owners in the fight of their lives to hold onto their land, the last thing they need right now is to be undermined by illegal logging or beef imports.
In short, it's going to be very difficult to protect Florida's natural wonders and the health of our economy from climate change unless we protect the world's rainforests. Our fate is as tied to the burning of the Amazon as it is to the kind of fuel burning inside a power plant….
Caption: "INTERIOR OF PRIMÆVAL FOREST ON THE AMAZONS,” from 1863’s The Naturalist on the River Amazons by Henry Walter Bates,
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