Peruvian Amazon Deforestation

Rachelle Black

Dr. Vivian Foss

English 300

2 May 2016

Deforestation of the Peruvian Amazon: Economic Growth Leads to Environmental Decline

Life of any kind is not sustainable without the environment. Likewise, the environment would not exist without life. Animal life and plant life are essential to maintaining a healthy environment because they create stability within the environment’s ecosystems and its natural cycles. Humans have not kept up their obligation to the environment that is so desperately needed. Instead of cherishing it and protecting it as it should have been, we have caused paramount damage to it by polluting its air and water and cutting down its forests. Construction of roads and other projects that are assumed to be economically

The only basis for the clearing is expansion of road networks and the potential profit to be gained by marketing the resources. The majority of the space created from deforestation went to the construction of extensive roadways such as the Interoceanic Highway (IOH) and its connecting roads between the Atlantic ports in Brazil and the Pacific Ports in Peru. Between the years of the IOH’s construction from 2004 to 2007, there was a substantial increase in forest damage rates throughout that area of Peru, (Oliveira et al 1234) similar to the increased forest-damage Brazil had faced as well. There is a clear link between the rates of deforestation and the rate of economic expansion in the Peruvian Amazon. When looked at in the bigger picture, it comes down to economic and capitalist greed over the health and maintenance of the

The need behind economic wealth is the goal to increase exports of commodities out of the Amazon Basin regions of Peru (Tollefson 1051). In a country that Juan Forero, in his article for The New York Times titled Energy Project vs. Environmentalists in Peru, deemed “resource rich but cash poor” there is a considerable solution; the solution to capitalize on its natural resources. Some of these resources however are unsustainable and cause damage to the environment when extracted. Resources like Coca leaves, the main component for the production of cocaine, which is in high demand in America and European countries. While the exportation of the plant may be a bringing in profit to the country, it is only doing so by the cultivators cutting down acres of trees within the Amazon basin to grow the plants. An estimated 500,000 acres of rainforests have been cut down due to drug cultivation alone. The growers then rid themselves of the chemicals they use to process and refine the drug by dumping their waste waters onto the Amazon floor and into the nearby rivers and streams (Brooke 12). Among the exports such as the Coca leaves and the natural gas liquids, whose extractors are uprooting the forest to lay down cables and holding tanks in the center of the Amazon (Forero 6),