They were old, they were there forever. Now they are gone. Gone for no reason what-so-ever. It was the trees. The oldest ones that were in that school yard, cut down to make . . . a parking lot.
I can remember when I was in that school, it was my favorite place to play, in that forest of trees. As you know trees produce oxygen so it increases global warming when you cut them down to make something as horrid as a parking lot. I'm not in that school anymore, I am in high school. I would have loved to see all the little kids having as much fun in that forest as I did when I was their age.
I came back to school after summer break, expecting everything to be as it was, but it wasn't because all those trees were gone. The principal didn't even know that they were doing that. The school already has a parking lot, but they felt like they needed a bigger one.
Now, those kids have nowhere to play. The school district also took out their normal sized playground, to put in a miniature plastic one. At lunch time there are about 100 kids all cramped onto that one playground like ants on a ant sugar cube. The forest was the only decent place to play.
I remember when I was in kindergarten, me and my friends were obsessed with this one tree, I know this sounds odd but we called it Grandmother Tree, and we thought there was treasure hidden under it. We dug every lunch period, and we actually hit something hard. We thought it was a trap door, but it was probably just the roots. We thought that the door led to a leprechaun's house where he would give us treasure, it was kinda funny! The tree actually had like a growth on it that looked like an old lady's face, that was the creepy part . . . that tree is still standing, but not for long. There is still a hole there from all those years ago. There are so many memories attached to that forest, but soon it will all be gone.
I thought about becoming a "tree hugger" (don't laugh at me please), and tie myself to a tree so they won't get rid of those few trees left standing, but I am not the type of person to do that.
I don't get the point of why they have to cut down those trees for a bigger parking lot, and I probably never will. I wish there was something I could do, but I don't think there is. All those memories will soon be gone, the jungle gym made from the roots of a tree, the monkey bars that were actually just a few branches on a tree, all the hollow trees, the stump where I removed a bullet from a pellet gun, and Grandmother Tree.
Everything.
If it was up to me, I wouldn't have cut down all those trees. There was actually what seemed like a much better way. Behind the school is a road that leads to some empty space, full of grass. They could have used that.
They did the same thing at a school really close by to the one I was just talking about. They cut all the big huge trees for a parking lot, but they had no choice, there was literally no where to park if you were picking up a student.
When you cut down a tree, there is less oxygen to be made from recycling CO2. Cutting down trees isn't the only thing that will affect the environment, when you build a parking lot, you are most likely going to use concrete and it will smell utterly horrid, and when you make it, you are using chemicals that are very unhealthy.
Deforestation is cutting down trees for use, such as paper, pencils etc. or cutting down trees to make space. Want to know something scary? McDonald's alone, uses 800 square miles of trees to make all their packaging for food! Did you know that every minute about as much as 20 football fields worth of forest is lost? Every week 500,000 hectors of forest are gone.
Deforestation is happening everywhere, especially in tropical countries. For example, once 14% of the Earth's land surface was covered by rain forests. Now rain forests only cover 6%. That is a decrease of 8%, and most times the trees aren't replaced by new ones. If nothing is done to stop this, tropical places such as Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka, might loose all their tropical forests by 2010!
Don't understand what I just said? Here let me make it simple to you. If this continues, there will be no jungle left for Tarzan to live in, so he will have to say "bye-bye" to his monkey or ape or whatever friends, move to New York City, get a haircut, an education, and a job. That won't last long though, because without the rain forest to act as a filter, there will be more green house gasses and soon there may not be an Earth! Well that probably would take some time but you see my point.
Tropical forests and old growth forests contain between 70% to 90% of the different species in this world. Because of deforestation, we are loosing 50-100 animal, and plant species!
It's hard to stop deforestation, but a lot of people are planting new trees to replace the ones that were cut down. If just one person planted a tree, you would think it wouldn't make much of a difference, but imagine hundreds of people planting trees! That would probably help our planet a lot!
Well I guess my whole point in this is that deforestation IS happening, and it is hard to stop, but we can all do our part to help. Right now, I am going to go plant a tree. Oh, by the way . . . please do not mock me because I was an odd child, yes I named a tree but my imaginary friends Uncle Rusty and Marianne didn't think it was that weird . . .
-ocean10kv
Author's Note: Sources:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071107205405AAY0j5m
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_growth_forests
http://www.ask.com/bar?q=what+is+deforestation&page=1&qsrc=178&ab=0&u=http%3A%2F %2Fwww.botany.uwc.ac.za%2FEnvfacts%2Ffacts%2Fdeforestation.htm
http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/society/deforestation.htm
