Rainforest Lessons 8-13 (copy)

Lesson 8/9/10: Living in the rainforest; rural vs urban

RURAL AREAS:

Rural areas are usually countryside areas.

We need to be careful not to make generalisations when talking about emerging developing countries like Brazil with wide variations of success and poverty.

There are still many tribes in the rainforest, especially in remote areas who have adapted to a sustainable way of life.

Sustainable means being able to meet the needs of the current generations without compromising for future generations.

KEY SKILL: Sketch maps

Sketch maps are supposed to be simple but still reflects what information you have to show. Sketch maps are usually a diagram for the landscape. A good thing to do is to highlight only the key information of something along with including:

• A north arrow like every map

• A title; brief summary of your map

• Key features; countries, mountains, rivers

• Annotations to explain what is happening

• Labels

• Could be drawn from an angle; bird’s eye view, side view?

These maps are usually not drawn to scale but don’t make it too crazy; i.e making Hong Kong look 100x bigger than China or something like that.

KEY SKILL: Climate graph plotting:

Must need features on a climate graph:

• Scale

• Title

• Axis labels

• Plotting accurately

• Using a pencil and ruler

• Easy to read

Optional: Extra information; average monthly temp/rainfall by month

One rural tribe in the rainforest is called the Kayapo tribe which have their ways of living and traditions.

• The Kayapo tribe live on the Xingu river

• The Kayapo village is usually a patch of flat land which has a circle of wooden buildings where families live.

• They have interesting traditions like red and black face paint, feathered head dresses, ear plugs and wooden discs which are all made from natural materials in the forest.

• They live by hunting, fishing and collecting food from the forest. They are subsistence farmers which means they only grow enough crops for themselves as they have no trading sources.

• They also use shifting cultivation to farm:

Shifting cultivation is started when a clearance is made by cutting down trees and burning the vegetation. This is called slash and burn. Crops are planted in that area and within four or five years the soil gets exhausted and the harvest gets poorer and poorer. When it is like that the clearing is abandoned and the farmers moved on. The clearing then grows over and the natural forest returns!

• The Kayapo are also really conscious of how to use and care about the forest. Plants and trees are used as building materials and all of their paints are made form plants. They use nine species of stingless bees to produce honey and medicines are made from over 650 different forest plants. Spare food is traded to keep waste minimal and small-scale farming is used. They also put limits on the number of species used too!

Should we contact tribes in the Amazon?

If we do it could be a tourist attraction, resourceful area and/or give high quality healthcare and add government protection to their areas.

But, it could spread diseases to tribes, violent clashes and tribal people may not be able to communicate with the world and adapt to the real world and could make their homes a target for logging, oil farming, logging etc.

A true story is when John Allen Chau is believed to have been hit with a volley of arrows when trying to visit a 30,000 year old tribe which aggressively resists outsiders. Which could make this even harder!

URBAN

Manaus is a fast growing city in the north-west of Brazil along the amazon river.

Brazil is an emerging developing country so it is neither rich nor poor. It is also a country experiencing fast economic growth and 87% of their population live in cities like Rio de Janeiro. That means many people are having to experience rural to urban migration, which means moving from the rural countryside to the urban city. Many new migrants in Manaus live on the edge of the city in favelas (shanty towns) where rainforest is cut down to make way for new houses.

There are many reasons why people migrate, they might do so for financial, social or family reasons and/or social, economic and environmental reasons. These are broadly categorised into:

Pull factors - positive things that ATTRACT PEOPLE to a particular place.

Push factors - negative things that make people want to MOVE AWAY.

Intervening obstacles - factors that make it harder to migrate.

Reasons to stay at the original place.

Examples of:

Pull factors - education, job opportunities, safety, opportunities in general

Push factors - war, politics, bad transport, crime

Intervening obstacles - visas, seas and bodies of water, hard to move, racism

Things that could make it easier to migrate are:

• Family are already there; there is already a ‘base’

• Government help; supplying favelas

• Good transport links

It is hard to make decisions for people and whether they should move or not. When doing so, first highlight the four broad categories of reasons, then see how much weight do they hold or how important it is and consider and compare. When comparing always remember point, explanation. Add evidence if needed.

Practice comparing rural to urban.

Lesson 11: Why is rainforest important?

It is important because of how biodiverse it is, how many resources it produces, its role in the carbon and water cycle, erosion and flooding and how many tribes live there. We will delve into more detail.

Biodiversity: Rainforests contain about half of the existing plant and animal species in the whole world! (That is a major case study fact) They also contain a third of the world’s bird species and 90% of its invertebrates. The remaining African rainforests contain more animals and plant species than anywhere else on the continent. In 2.5 acres of the Amazon there could be 300 different tree species compared to 40 in the whole of the UK! 2.5 acres could also contain 1500 species of plants!

Medicines: There are hundreds of plants in the rainforest that are used in modern medicines. Specifically 25% of all of them are taken from plants in the rainforest. Because 20% of plants are at risk of extinction and only 1% of plant species have been studied a lab in London called Kew Gardens are taking DNA samples to regrow these plants. For example the drug taken from the rosy periwinkle of Madagascar called Vincristine allows 80% remission from childhood leukaemia and curare can be used as a muscle relaxant in small doses.

Foods: 80% of the world’s diet originated from rainforest plants and many foods are still being discovered! Foods that come from the rainforest include: 3000 types of fruits, coffee, rice, potatoes and this special fruit called the peach palm of Brazil which has twice the food value of banana and more protein than maize.

Erosion and flooding: During heavy downpours, the mass of vegetation in the rainforest catches and holds much of the rain, then disposes of it through evaporation and transpiration - the process of plants releasing water vapour from their stomata - it acts like a bog umbrella breaking the force of rain and protecting the ground’s surface. Where trees are cut down in large numbers, this natural protection is removed and soil erosion increases and nutrients and minerals are washed away. Trees also help to control the amount of water that is held in the soil and it helps prevent flooding because if the rainfall patterns changed to due logging, there could be flooding because there is no barrier from the soil.

People: Tribes in the rainforest have lived for 40,000 years in Asia but in African rainforests the sights of human settlement are no more than 3,000 years old. There are around 1,000 indigenous tribes in the rainforests of the world. They have developed ways of life that allow them to use the forest without destruction. Lots of people are currently trying to exploit rainforest land for logging, plantation, oil and hydroelectric dams. European settlers have been unsuccessful due to their lack of immunity to diseases.

Lesson 12: Why is there conflict in the rainforest?

Conflict can be caused by social, economic and environmental reasons. Usually there are lots of different types of people that use the tropical rainforest, such as:

• Farmers and cattle ranchers (cattle ranchers are loggers who take down the rainforest to add more space for cattle)

• Loggers

• Dam builders

• Construction workers

• Miners

• Tribes

And then you have the “preventers” of negative uses:

• Environmental activists

• Environmental charities

• Government

This can create conflict due to all the different opinions and usages of the rainforest; loggers and dam builders and cattle ranchers have to cut down land and cause deforestation for their jobs but environmental activists do not approve of that as they would like to preserve the rainforest and live sustainably.

KEY WORD: SUSTAINABLE - Development that meets the needs of the present generation without compromising for future generations.

A true case study on conflict leading to drama is: Chico Mendez. Chico was an environmental activist in the 1980s who had courage to step up and protest for rainforest rights, which had the domino effect on the present day. Chico has publicised and made his opinions known on why cattle ranching is bad, why shifting cultivation destroy the forest, how logging damages the world and more. Until, he made a cattle rancher feel so unsafe on if he found out what he was doing, that he killed Chico as 80% of deforestation is made by cattle ranchers.

CASE STUDY FACTS:

• 80% of deforestation is caused by making room for cattle.

• 80% of Mahogany wood sold in the UK is from the Amazon.

• Dams destroy ecosystems as they cause coastal erosion and loss of nutrients at the estuary.

Lesson 13: Rainforest threats

It can be very difficult to keep track of threats to the rainforest as often areas are huge and the dense vegetation makes it challenging to travel through it. This is where remote sensing and satellite images come into play; everyone can keep a close eye on whether rainforests have been damaged and can tell us what is happening in rainforests in an instant and we can even estimate the amount of lost trees!

THREAT 1: HYDROELECTRIC DAMS

Dams create hydroelectric power. This is electricity created by water running through turbines in the dam. A positive is that it produces electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions so it has a smaller impact on the environment. But, a negative is that you have to flood land to create a dam.

Around 400 square kilometers have been flooded by the Samuel Hydroelectric Plant which means around 400 million trees were lost in the creation of the dam. If we compared the region from 1984 to present day, there would be huge differences.

THREAT 2: MINING

Carajas is a mine, a mine is where minerals are dug out of the ground which opens deep holes in the ground which is called an open cast mine. Human features can take over these rural regions because the miners have to live at the site too. It can cause civilisation and CO2 emissions along with transport methods that could be a threat.

Iron is extracted from that mine and turned into steel. 300,000 tonnes of iron is mined daily and the trucks are the size of houses! And when they get enough iron, they plan to turn it back into a rainforest and protect it which makes it very sustainable. The company have also paid for lots of resources like conservation rangers, vehicles and helicopter support, hoping for profit.

THREAT 3: PALM OIL

• Palm oil is used in chocolate, shampoo, toothpaste, car fuel and detergent.

• The bad thing of palm oil production is forest destruction to make palm oil.

• Indonesia is a high palm oil producer and is under threat through palm oil extraction; 15% of all known species of plants and animals are in Indonesia.

• Only 400 Sumatran tigers are left in the wild.

• Problems this also causes is land conflicts, forest fires and displacement of citizens.

• Peat lands store 35 billion tonnes of carbon and it gets released when there are problems so the trees can turn them into oxygen/

• We are linked to palm oil because the extracted palm oil is sold to traders and sold to companies then sold to us in the supermarket.

• Traders have changed and become more sustainable by cleaning up supply chains.