What is beauty? Is it a word softly spoken to the one you love? Perhaps a word spoken by my brother, to describe Taylor swift. I agree with Lee Wallace when he said “beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder”. To me and Cyrtsa a fairy from the movie ferngully the rainforest is truly beautiful. Rainforests are facing a challenge in our world today: being destroyed by many different harmful elements.
The movie ferngully is based on a fairy named Cyrsta being trained in the web of life. The web of life is the forces of destruction verse the forces of creation. She and the other fairies are able to hear the forest and feel its pain. Pain brought upon by hexxus the evil in this story representing pollution. In this story pollution and destruction are coming over the rainforest and the fairy community of ferngully using a tree cutting machine. The machine cuts down the trees and turns them into lumber while puffing out many harmful gases and polluting the waters with toxic waste. Crysta and the others must stop this machine and hexxus before ferngully is destroyed. This may just seem like a story to you, but it’s very real to me.
One of the major problems facing the rainforests today is logging. The rainforest disappears at a rate of 6,000 acres an hour. The trees logged are used for paper, pencils and many other items. One of the most typical rainforest trees is the Corozo palm. This tree takes 15 years to grow and yet we are using the nuts from this tree to make buttons. Buttons, I mean of all things we are destroying these trees to make buttons! Although this is not the only danger facing our rainforests it is a problem among many others.
Oiling, in the rainforests is also another problem. In 2003, there was a lawsuit brought upon Texaco, by 30,000 Ecuadorians, for dumping millions of gallons of toxic waste in the Ecuadorian Rainforests. It is estimated that 18 billion gallons of toxic waste water and 17 million gallons of crude oil were dumped along 1,700 acres of this amazing Ecuadorian rainforest. Not only did they kill the forest, but an estimated 1,400 people that lived in that jungle region died of cancer because of the oil contamination. When these oiling companies go into our rainforests they present a threat not only to the environment, but to the people.
Pesticides contribute to the pollution of the rainforest as well. Pesticides from farming crops such as soybean or sugar cultivation are harmful to the rainforests. The pesticides pollute the soil and the rivers. Endangering both the trees from the soil, and the animals that drink from those rivers. Every time pesticides are being sprayed the rivers and soil are be contaminated. Rainforests are a beautiful and resourceful environment that we should be thankful to have.
We realized the danger we are putting on the rainforests so where do we go from here? We can recycle paper to reduce the number of trees we cut down in logging. We could walk or bike instead of drive to save gas therefore limiting the amount of oiling done in the rainforest. Also we can switch our pesticides with nitrogen fertilizers which can actually boost the growth of plants in our tropical rainforests. Texaco, won the lawsuit (mentioned above) the 30,000 Ecuadorians lost, we will all lose if we lose our rainforests. The rainforest is an amazing gift we should be thankful to have. This includes treating it with the upmost respect.
I almost forgot to mention the end of the movie. At the end of the movie, all the fairies work together to defeat hexxus (pollution) and save ferngully. We can all pull together to fight pollution and make our world better for the generations yet to come.
Resources
Site: http://www.tropical-rainforest-animals.com/Environmental-Pollution-Tropical-Rainforests.html
Last updated: June 2008
Written by: Irina Ignatova
Site: http://corozo.net/en/coro_2_nut.htm
Written by: Manexpo company
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