Chapter 9:

Kolbert visits Reserve 1202 with ornithologist Mario Cohn-Haft, a place in Brazil near the Venezuelen border, the reserve itself has 25 acres of untouched rainforest surrounded by ‘scrub’. It’s regulated by the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project, or BDFFP, founded by Tom Lovejoy. Lovejoy created BDFFP to protect the rainforests from farmers and ranchers. Cohn-Haft takes her into the forests and he showed her his talent of identifying a bird species on how the bird sings. He then tells her that over the years he’s noticed a drop in the variety of birds and other animals, “ there wasn't just suddenly this new equilibrium with fewer species. There was this steady degradation in diversity over time” (pg 179). There is a reason why the biodiversity was decreasing and that is because of deforestation. A pair of British ecologists said, “ Hardly a day passes without one being told that tropical deforestation is extinguishing roughly one species every hour, or maybe even one every minute” (pg 186). The author is saying that deforestation is not only getting rid of trees, which are essential to fighting global warming, but also hurting animal’s habitats, leading to the extinction or decrease of different animal species. We must learn how to manage our resources in order to not take so much. We as a society have been taking too much from the environment which resulted in the decrease of biodiversity, in order to protect our environment we must conserve it.