Environmental Problems
...now under the same standing as the issues such as the damage of atmosphere and oceans are, since it has become overly clear that these two are not the only integral elements of nature that are seriously injured. A biologist from Harvard, E.O. Wilson considers reduction of rain forest areas as "the greatest extinction since the end of the age of dinosaurs." However, rain forest depletion has become an important issue in media and different conferences, which produces positive and effective criticism against local governments that are counted as the sources of the problem. Nevertheless, governments continue to ignore his issue and continually cut the forests. Brazil, for the example, cuts down a forest area that resembles the size of Nebraska, every year. Other countries to follow this example are: Indonesia, Zaire, Papua-New Guinea, Malaysia, Burma, the Philippines, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, and Venezuela. Forests in these countries are all but gone. This means that directly or indirectly governments today pose a direct and major threat as a result of shallow, non-planned and uncoordinated projects. The 2001-2002 World Resources Report designed and put forth by United Nations, claiming that certain governments use around $700 billion dollars for unpractical projects that subsidize environmentally unreasonable projects. These projects cause negative effects in areas of agriculture, water usage, energy consumption and transportation. Much of the areas of tropical rain forests stand under governmental control, so their survival, which unfortunately has a thin chance, stands at a direct mercy of these governments. Amazon forests serve for local governments as an effective tool to lessen their external national debts, which has prompted World Bank and other non-governmental organizations to help around this issue by subsidizing these liabilities. A positive trend that might prove to be a solution to this problem lays within (Keith Richards) the natives. Different projects as a part of the research are done recently to increase the understanding about the popular medicine used by indigenous tribes of these areas. Their usage if different plants, as much as 200 , for finding cures has persuaded different pharmaceutical companies to turn their attention to the beginning of medicine, the traditional ways of findi...