The rainforests are the lungs of the planets, Greenies! Why isn't Al Gore down there putting it back together?
"(snipped)
Two weeks ago, he said, a group of biologists and environmentalists from an international organization explored the nation's rainforest along the Pacific Coast and found five new species of amphibians, two new species of mammals and 100 birds that hadn't been classified before.
"They were so surprised … they thought they were in a new Eden," he said.
But this paradise is fast disappearing as coca production moves into the area. During an aerial tour he took recently with World Bank officials, Calderón saw the destruction of the jungle had accelerated. "It's going to be destroyed because of the habits of consumers of cocaine all over the world," he said.
For every gram of cocaine consumed, he said, four square meters of pristine rainforest disappears for good. Every year, due to coca production, he said, 494 acres of pristine rainforest is lost forever. Over the last 20 years, Colombia has lost about 5.4 million acres of tropical rainforest to coca cultivation, leaving behind denuded pockets of wasteland.
Smoke from the slash-and-burn technique used to clear the land before planting is a major source of pollution in the Colombian jungles. To make the jungle soil hospitable for coca plants, growers require about 150 kilograms of solid and 57 gallons of liquid herbicides and pesticides to process 2.5 acres of coca.
A cocaine lab and an array of empty plastic containers for coke-processing chemicals sit precariously on a mountainside. Trees capable of rooting down the soil were removed to make way for coca plants, leading to landslides. - Courtesy of El Colombiano newspaper.
"After three or four crops, the land is practically depleted, and those chemicals stay there for hundreds and hundreds of years," Calderón said.
The processing of cocaine itself requires gasoline, cement, contaminated water and such chemicals as sulfuric acid and ammonium. All of this, plus tons of trash and vegetable waste, are scattered on the ground and thrown into rivers.
But despite this national "ecocide," he said, "this story is flying under the radar of the environmental organizations." It has not stirred the outrage that was generated by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, although the environmental damage caused by cocaine in Colombia is 15 times worse."
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