"One of the most important and threatened habitats is forests. The world continued to lose forested area in the 1990s, although the extent of loss is debated. The Forest Resources Assessment 2000 put out by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) cites a global loss of forested area of 2.2 percent over the decade. But that figure may be conservative. FAO includes plantation area in its forest totals, even though plantations lack the biological diversity of natural forests and cannot provide many of the same environmental services. And in an effort to standardize definitions globally, FAO has dropped the minimum tree coverage needed for an area to qualify as "forest" from 20 percent to 10 percent. This small definitional change nearly quadrupled Australia's forested area compared with the 1990 figure, leading the World Resources Institute (WRI) to note that "some parts of the Australian outback that are officially classified in Australia as desert ... are now recorded by FAO as forest. "

Deforestation disrupts natural systems the way the attack on New York disrupted the urban system of telephone lines, transit routes, and commerce-and on a far larger scale, since serious deforestation occurs daily in dozens of countries. The damage from deforestation borne by developing countries is especially disturbing when linked to wasteful consumption habits.

Indirect effects of forest loss are also serious. Forests provide a host of environmental services: trees regulate the flow of water between soils and the atmosphere; their roots hold soils in place, preventing erosion; and their branches, bark, leaves, and soils provide habitat to the largest collection of biodiversity of any ecosystem on the planet. Deforestation means lost lives and livelihoods.

Deforestation can be costly. Record flooding in the Yangtze River basin during the summer of 1998 drove 120 million people from their homes. Although initially referred to as a "natural disaster," the removal of 85 percent of the original tree cover in the basin had left little vegetative cover to hold the heavy rainfall."

Deforestation also diminishes the recycling of water inland, thus reducing rainfall in the interior of continents. When rain falls on a healthy stand of dense forest, roughly one fourth runs off, returning to the sea, while three fourths evaporates, either directly or through transpiration. When land is cleared for farming or grazing or is clear cut by loggers, this ratio is reversed-three fourths of the water returns to the sea and one fourth evaporates to be carried further inland. As deforestation progresses, nature's mechanism for watering the interior of large continents such as Africa and Asia is weakening. The world is also losing its biological diversity as plant and animal species are destroyed faster than new species evolve. This biological impoverishment of the earth is the result of habitat destruction, pollution, climate alteration, and hunting.

Natural disasters are on the increase. Munich Re, one of the world's largest re-insurance companies, reported that three times as many great natural catastrophes occurred during the 1990s as during the 1960s. Economic losses increased eightfold. Insured losses multiplied 15 -fold. Although Munich Re's classification does not distinguish between natural and human-induced catastrophes, much of the increase appears to be- due to catastrophes, including storms, droughts, and wild fires that are either exacerbated or caused by human activities."

Insurers are keenly aware that even modest changes in climate can lead to quantum jumps in damage. For example, a 10 percent increase in a storm's wind speed can double the damage it inflicts. The cost of dealing with rising sea level from a modest temperature rise could easily overwhelm the economies of many countries.

Andrew Dlugolecki, a senior officer at the CGMU Insurance Group-Britain's largest insurance group-reports that property damage worldwide is rising roughly 10 percent a year. He believes that we are only beginning to see the economic fallout from climate change. At this rate of growth, by 2065 the amount of damage would exceed the projected gross world product. Well before then, Dlugolecki notes, "the world would face bankruptcy."

Perhaps the most disturbing consequence of rising temperature is ice melting. Over the last 35 years, the ice covering the Arctic Sea has thinned by 42 percent. A study by two Norwegian scientists projects that within 50 years there will be no summer ice left in the Arctic Sea. The discovery of open water at the North Pole by an ice breaker cruise ship in mid-August 2000 stunned many in the scientific community."

This particular thawing does not affect sea level because the ice that is melting is already in the ocean. But the Greenland ice sheet is also starting to melt. Greenland is three times the size of Texas and the ice sheet is up to 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) thick in some areas. An article in Science notes that if the entire ice sheet were to melt, it would raise sea level by some 7 meters (23 feet), inundating the world's coastal cities and Asia's rice-growing river floodplains. Even a 1 meter rise would cover half of Bangladesh's rice land, dropping food production below the survival level for millions of people.

Again, please read the entire books for yourself. We are starting a non-profit, ecologically focused organization "Green is Green" (.com/org) which will support only good, balanced, proactive environmental organizations and fund initiatives in smart, green businesses. God our Father has given us an incredible planet, and if we do not treat our Mother Earth right, we are going to find ourselves kicked off planet! Hopefully, you now understand the importance of our motto:

Heart Craft Homes is proud of its contribution to sound ecologically responsible organizations while strongly opposed to extremism. We are members and supporters of the following organizations through "Green is Green": EEBA: Energy Efficient Building Association, Inc., Union of Concerned Scientists (www.)UCSUSA.org, Audubon Society, and others.

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