On Sat, 24 Jun 2000 14:57:42 -0500, Mike Miller wrote:
>This is most likely another one of those email scams used to get your
>individual email addresses and political preference information from a
>group listserve. This is what the DELETE Key is for. Mike Miller
This is perhaps a good point at which to remind people that Patrick
Moore of Greenpeace recently held a news conference during which he
rather thoroughly debunked most of the hysteria regarding the alleged
disappearance of the Amazon rain forest. Moore, in conjunction with
some other environmentalists and the Brazilian Ministry of Environment
(?) collaborated to study series of satellite images in order to
determine the actual rate of disappearance.
In the end, the actual rate is many orders of magnitude less than the
numbers set forward by rain forest activists. Moore as much as said the
whole thing was a scam to raise money for those groups, while the
reality on the ground in Brazil is far, far, different than that
conveyed by activists.
It is also worth adding that the Amazon rain forest is only about
11-15,000 years old in any case. It *hasn't* been around forever, and
soils in the region seem to have managed just fine for millennia before
the rain forest ever came into being. To state that "the soil in the
Amazon forest is useless without the forest itself " is patent drivel.
There *are* certain tropical soils, called CAT clays, which because of
strongly reducing environments and other factors harden into brick on
exposure to air. In fact, these soils are cut into blocks and used as
building stones in some parts of the world.
Bart
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Jul 03 2000 - 12:00:40 EDT