20% of Amazon deforested

NVDL: Anyone see a link between this headline and the Hurricane's we're seeing in the Gulf? By the way, we may potentially have 2 Hurricanes hitting Florida at virtually the same time this week. That is unprecedented. Does anyone think that wiping out one fifth of our planet's lungs might...er...have any sort of impact on the climate? And who has wiped out 20% of the Amazon? Bugs and worms and ants...it couldn't be the incredibly intelligent race of techno-savies known as homo consumer could it? It couldn't possibly be human beings causing these changes could it?

The Amazon region covers about 1.6 million square miles of Brazil, nearly 60 percent of the country. About 20 percent of that land has already been deforested.

clipped from www.msnbc.msn.com RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Amazon deforestation jumped 69 percent in the past 12 months — the first such increase in three years — as rising demand for soy and cattle pushes farmers and ranchers to raze trees, officials said Saturday. Some 3,088 square miles of forest were destroyed between August 2007 and August 2008 — a 69 percent increase over the 1,861 square miles felled in the previous 12 months, according to the National Institute for Space Research, or INPE, which monitors destruction of the Amazon. The country lost 2.7 percent of its Amazon rain forest in 2007, or 4,250 square miles. Environmental officials fear even more land will be razed this year — but they have not forecast how much.