VEGAN TOEIC クラブコミュの第２８号　メキシコの熱帯雨林

東パキスタンと北西インドにまたがるタール砂漠は、
二千年前には豊かな植物の緑が生い茂っていました。

しかし、この二千年の間に過放牧によって砂漠化してしまったのです。

先週はアマゾンの熱帯雨林をとりあげました。
今日はメキシコの熱帯雨林を観察します。更なるタール砂漠をうみださないために、、。

Mexico's largest rain forest, the semitropical Selva Lacandona, while considerably smaller than the Amazon, boasts more native mammalian species than the Brazilian forest.
Its Barbasco vine provided the ingredients of the first birth control pill.
The forest supports half the animal and plant species of Mexico.
The Lacandona is being threatened by a combination of population pressures, political policies, and destructive farming techniques, notably cattle grazing.
In the 1970s, the government of Mexico, unwilling to redistribute vast estates controlled by wealthy land barons, encouraged landless peasants to settle in the Lacandona.
Today three hundred thousand people inhabit forest villages, and they have destroyed almost half of the four-million-acre forest.

Typically the Lacandonan forest villagers use slash-and-burn techniques to clear sections of ancient forest, then plant corn or other crops on the land for a year or two, until the thin forest topsoil is depleted.
At that point, they allow cattle to graze the abandoned pastures.
After three to five years, the cattle leave bare bedrock in their wake.
More than half of Mexico is grazed by livestock.
Most wildlife―wolves, bears, jaguars, mountain lions―have been removed from the Mexican landscape.
More of Mexico's grain is fed to cattle than to people.

―――中略―――
Around the globe, wherever the onslaught of ranching is felt, forest is lost, native flora and fauna face extinction, streams and rivers are polluted, soil erosion worsens, topsoil blows off in the wind or runs off overgrazed hills, dust storms arise, and Nature plots her revenge in the form of desert.
And with desert will come famine.

「MAD COWBOY」 HOWARD F.LYMAN & GLEN MERZER著
1998年　A TOUCHSTONE BOOK出版　151〜153ページ引用


単語の意味などは　薫さんのメルマガ　をご参照ください（2010年2月21日第28号）
http://archive.mag2.com/0001006823/20100221174104000.html