Future Elementary Science Educators: Linking Educators and The Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon Rainforest

Deforestation, Conservation, and

How Elementary Educators Can Teach

Their Students About It

As educators, it is important for us to teach our students about the importance of the world around them and how it can affect them directly and indirectly. We can use the Amazon Rainforest to teach our students to connect the world around them to the larger global perspective. We can use the Amazon Rainforest to not only teach what Common Core wants our students to know, but we can also use it to teach our students about the place they hold in this world and how they contribute to it. The Amazon Rainforest raises many issues that can be taught cross-curricularly while teaching our students the very beginnings of advocacy and having a voice.

Map of the Amazon rainforest ecoregions as delineated by the WWF. Yellow line approximately encloses the Amazon drainage basin. National boundaries shown in black.Satellite image from NASA.

The lush Amazon Rainforest

The results of rainforest deforestation

Amazon Rainforest animals

Trees have been here long before humans and they will be here long after humans. Trees give us oxygen, paper products, lumber and lumber products, shade, and so much more. The Amazon Rainforest is not just home to about 10 billion trees, but it also holds one of the biggest ecosystems with more than half of the world's estimated 10 million species of plants, animals and insects.

What are the ecosystems that exist within the Amazon Rainforest?

To date, at least 40,000 plant species, 427 mammals (e.g. jaguar, anteater and giant otter), 1,300 birds (e.g. harpy eagle, toucan and hoatzin), 378 reptiles (e.g. boa), more than 400 amphibians (e.g. dart poison frog) and around 3,000 freshwater fishes including the piranha have been found in the Amazon. Within the Amazon Rainforest there are three specific ecosystems. The first ecosystem is called Varzea, or floodplain forests. This ecosystem consist of areas close to riversides that are flooded during the rainy season. The next ecosystem is called Terra firma, or the rainforest itself. This ecosystem includes forest area that is not on a floodplain, and is usually not near rivers. The third ecosystem that exists in the Amazon Rainforest is called Igapo. This exists near freshwater lakes and lower reaches of rivers.

“The wildlife and plantlife in the Amazon has evolved over thousands of years and in such a way that every living creature relies on another to survive. This means the ecosystems of the Amazon Rainforest are extremely fragile.”

Endangered species in the Amazon: Habitat loss is threatening the survival of many species within the Amazon Rainforest. Some of the species from the Amazon that are currently endangered include the Giant Otter, the South American Tapir, and the red faced Uakari. This is only a few of the many species that are endangered within the Amazon Rainforest and the number of species will continue to increase as long as deforestation is occurring. The IUCN Red List was founded in 1964 and is a comprehensive inventory list of the global conservation status of biological species. Currently the IUCN (May 2013) lists 2633 species of near threatened, vulnerable, endangered, and critically endangered forest inhabiting species in South America.

Are humans being selfish by taking advantage of the rainforest?

The Amazon rainforest is home to an estimated 390 billion trees and 16,000 diverse tree species.The Amazon Rainforest plays a vital role in the global ecosystem by providing 20% of the world's oxygen and holding up to 17% of the world’s terrestrial carbon stores. The ecosystem in the rainforest relies mostly on mutualism. Well, it’s suppose to be a mutual relationship where the trees give living things oxygen and the living things give the trees carbon. Lately, it’s been more of an unequal relationship benefitting more heavily to humans. We get more out of the trees than the trees get from us. As we have mentioned before, humans use trees for almost everything to live a comfortable life. The Amazon Rainforest is very important to humans, both directly and indirectly, but it is also in trouble and at risk of being permanently wiped out.

The Amazon Rainforest gives us a variety of products that we depend on in our daily lives. Most people do not realize how many products actually come out of the rainforest. In order to save these products from getting destroyed, we need to keep in mind the effects of deforestation and what is being done to help it. Following is a link to a page that provides a long list of all the products that we receive from the Amazon Rainforest. (click here for list of products)

Why is Earth’s largest rainforest being destroyed?

What’s Happening?: The current rate of destruction is about 1 acre each second, which is a bit less than a US football field. (Rainforest Foundation US; http://www.rainforestfoundation.org/commonly-asked-questions-and-facts/)

There have been several ways that humans and human interactions have negatively impacted the Rainforest.

These ways include: Deforestation, cattle ranching, logging, mining, fires, road construction, subsistence and commercial agriculture. Actually, cattle ranching is the leading cause of the deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. Other human interactions make up slightly less than 30% of deforestation causes in the Amazon. These include: small-scale agriculture, large scale or commercial agriculture, logging, fires, urbanization, mining, dams, and road construction.

Amazon Rainforest Cattle Pasture

Why is this happening?: Deforestation is happening because humans either use the products from these trees in a variety of ways or clear the land of trees to make land for other products. Unfortunately, it is much cheaper for fields to be burned or destroyed rather than being replanted for future growth.

Forest Fire in the Amazon

The Rio Huaypetue gold mine in Peru

What that means: These specific processes threaten the lives of the people and animals who live in and rely on the Amazon Rainforest and its products for their survival. We use the land to benefit the lives of people who live in continents oceans away from the rainforest, but what about the people and animals who live in the rainforest and rely on the balanced ecosystem for survival?

What are humans doing to help?

The rainforest is very important, so what are we doing to help it?

Since 1970, an area in the Amazon the size of the state of Texas has been cleared. This is due to the massive amount of deforestation that has been occurring in the rainforest. The rainforest has experienced a giant loss of biodiversity within the several ecosystems that coexist in the rainforest. The deforestation in the rainforest has produced large amounts of greenhouse gasses, accounting for almost 20% of the global emissions in these greenhouse gases. We tend to only think about the effects of deforestation to the direct ecosystem of The Amazon Rainforest, but we forget that the mass destruction in the rainforest is starting to affect the ecosystem of the world.

To help stop the devastation of trees, Brazil has implemented six strategies to help save the trees and the rainforest. The strategies include creating protected areas, implementing restrictions for industry cooperations, satellite monitoring of these protected areas, improved reinforcement, creating international incentives, and political will. Brazil is not the only country helping the cause. Norway has pledged $1 billion to rainforest preservation efforts in the Amazon or $5 per ton of sequestered carbon. After much hard work, over half of The Amazon Rainforest is now a designated national park or indigenous land, bringing the deforestation rate of The Amazon Rainforest down 80% in the last decade. (See article: 6 Ways Brazil is Saving the Amazon)

Much of the hard work can be credited to teamwork: many countries are providing financial assistance to Brazil if they successfully reduce deforestation and CO2 emissions. In this program, industrialized nations pay for carbon to be maintained or increased in trees and soils through better forest management. Brazil has received over 7 billion dollars from countries including Norway, United Kingdom, United States and Germany. (See article: Stopping Deforestation)

The situation in Brazil has changed significantly since 2006, when a high profile campaign by Greenpeace forced Brazil's largest soy producers to commit to avoiding deforestation for new production. Greenpeace realized that the biggest problem associated with deforestation is companies continuing to clear land of thousands of trees to grow their crops; the biggest crop produced being soybeans. This group convinced companies to sign a moratorium, banning the purchase of soybeans from recently cleared land. There was also a ban from buying beef from recently cleared land. This made it hard for companies to sell their crops and beef from the newly cleared land with hopes of pushing them away from The Amazon Rainforest. This also made sure that less land is being cleared and that landowners who do clear land are not benefitting from it.

Even with all the efforts that are being done to conserve the rainforests, the impacts of climate change threatens both the rainforests and existing crops.

Overall, even though there is work being done to help save the rainforest and prevent deforestation, there is still a lot of work to be done. What more can we be doing?

By teaching the Amazon Rainforest we are teaching our students to connect the world around them to the larger global perspective. You are teaching students to link the concrete objective of looking at the things around them and connecting it to the abstract objective of thinking about where everything they have comes from.

Teaching about the Amazon Rainforest is a valuable way to educate students of all ages about many different Science topics, such as ecosystems, deforestation, conservation, transmission of energy, and the impact that human beings have on the environment.

You can link teaching about the Amazon Rainforest to the obvious science concepts, but you can also use the Amazon Rainforest to teach that our voices have an impact. You can use the issues discussed above to teach opinion writing and letter writing within your classroom. The issues in this blog can strengthen your Language Arts lessons by demonstrating how to write about cause and effect. An example of this could be an opinion piece or a letter describing why the rainforest is important, why we should save it, why we should care about it, what we get from the rainforest, and many other topics.

You can also link the information given above to your Mathematics lessons by demonstrating to your children how to create and read a graph. We not only provided many graphs but also many statistics that you can give to your students to show them how to graph to show a story with numbers. For example, you can graph the statistics of the increasing devastation of deforestation to show what is happening to the rainforest and what is at stake. You can also graph the statistics and numbers that show how the positives happening in the rainforest and how it is improving.

Another way to link the Amazon Rainforest cross-curricularly is to teach about how involved politics and government are as well as teaching about the different countries involved with helping Brazil with the Amazon Rainforest in your Social Studies classroom. Another way to link the Amazon Rainforest to your Social Studies lesson is to discuss the goods and services that are heavily involved in the products from the rainforest. You can discuss the products we receive from the rainforest and how this is made possible. You can also use the many issues discussed above to discuss the importance of geography that is played with the Amazon Rainforest and the massive deforestation rate.

Here is a chart that correlate to Common Core State Standards and Next Generation Science Standards broken down by each grade level for each lesson provided below: