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How Artisan Furniture Is Helping the Rainforests

By SYLVIA WESTALL Love your new dining room table ... but did you ask the salesman whether it's made from chopped up rainforest trees? A growing number of shoppers are doing just that when buying furniture because of concerns about the effects of shrinking rainforests on global warming and the extinction of rare species of flora and fauna that inhabit these forests.

This is about the uses of the trees and plants in the rain forest. 

Ecotourism is more profitable than other ventures like cattle ranching, timber logging and farming, researchers have shown for the first time for a region of Peru. The findings are likely to give local people the financial incentive to keep neighbouring virgin rainforest pristine, helping to lock away carbon.

Clear-cut swaths of the Amazon rain forest in Quiandeua, Brazil, are often planted with manioc, or cassava, a shrub grown for its starchy root. Farmers slash-and-burn large parcels of forest every year to create grazing and crop lands, but the forest's nutrient-poor soil often renders the land ill-suited for agriculture, and within a year or two, the farmers move on.

Whenever people talk about deforestation, usually the things that spring to mind are negative thoughts brought on mostly by media hypes and environmentalist drives. People think about global warming, depletion of natural resources, and the casual extinction of indigenous fauna and flora. Yet people don't seem to realize that there are actually quite a few benefits of deforestation.

Why are they being destroyed? In the past 50 years much of the rainforest in Africa and Asia has been destroyed. Large areas of rainforest are being cut down, often in order to remove just a few logs, and rainforest is being destroyed at double the rate of all previous estimates.

Amazon Rainforest Products There are many different products from the Amazon rainforest. Following are some important products and a brief explanation about them.