Indonesia’s Fight: Commercial Farming vs. Rainforest Preservation
March 31, 2010 Kyriaki (Sandy) Venetis 
Indigenous hunter in Papuan rainforest. Photo by buzzine.com.
Expanding farm lands to feed ever growing human populations and livestock, or conserving rainforests that many consider the lungs of the Earth?
It’s always a hard question in itself, and in the situation of Indonesia’s Papua province, it’s even more complicated.
As the Rainforest Information Centre puts it - “Rainforests have been called the “Lungs of the Earth,” but the term is misleading. Although rainforests do release vast amounts of oxygen into the atmosphere, they absorb just as much through the decay of organic matter. However, they do play an important role in regulating the Earth’s atmosphere by storing carbon in their biomass. When forests are destroyed, the carbon they contain is released into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide.”
Scientists are forever debating whether global warning is real. Even for those that don’t believe that global warming is real, rainforest deforestation also destroys the habitats of untold numbers of species that make them home. And, lets not forget all the natural medicines that have been discovered and that those that never will.