Deforestation

I did not realize that Amazon deforestation had reached such critical levels. Interesting facts from the article linked below:

• Severe drought is returning to the Amazon for a second successive year.
• New research suggests that one further dry year beyond that could tip the whole vast forest into a cycle of destruction.
• Global warming and deforestation [are] pushing the entire enormous area towards a "tipping point", where it would start to die.
• The wet Amazon Basin would turn to dry savannah at best, desert at worst.
• In the long term, it could send global warming out of control, eventually making the world uninhabitable.
• This year [...] the water is draining away even faster than last year - and there are still more than three months of the dry season to go.
• Illegal cutting as reached far into the forest after the American multinational Cargill built a huge port for soya three years ago.
• Entrepreneurs [...] cut down trees to grow soya [...] destined to feed supermarket chickens in Europe.
• The destruction is unlikely to be brought under control, unless the world helps.
• Doing this would take US$60 billion year - less than a third of the cost of the Iraq war.
• About a fifth of the Amazonian rainforest has been razed completely. Another 22 per cent has been harmed by logging, allowing the sun to penetrate to the forest floor, drying it out.
• Read the article: A disaster to take everyone's breath away

To continue a theme, do you know what fuels this destruction? Right, the availability of cheap oil and the enormous power that it provides.