Leading Lines

The next step to writing my first draft is writing an introduction, or lead, for my paper. To do this I followed step one of exercise 4.3 in The Curious Researcher. This required me to write three leads based on the types of leads presented in the book:

1. Why are there so many people who seem to get riled up about deforestation? How much harm does it really do? What can be done to deal with the issues associated with deforestation? Such questions have occurred to many people at one time or another, but the answers are often hard to discover. Most of the information on the topic seems to be just another radical environmentalist ranting about the evils of humanity. Those sources that aren't ranting are often confusing, or try to be so academic that no one can understand them. After all, what is the relevance of economic indicators of agroforestry techniques in Legal Amazonia? I encountered much of this myself initially, turning me off to the reality of deforestation and making me skeptical of what seemed to be exaggerated doomsday reports. It turns out that deforestation is a problem, but the implications are more complex than just global warming and killing some tree frogs.

2. Deforestation is a major problem in today's world. Such a major problem that much of the worlds' forests are depleted beyond the point of no return. The major deforestation occurring in modern times takes place mostly in developing countries, who are ill-equipped to deal with the issues associated with it. In the past, other countries have also gone through a period of deforestation in their history, but all of them have dealt with it in time to prevent complete destruction. This paper will attempt to show why the developing countries of the past were able to deal with the problem, while modern developing countries are not. From the conclusions of this explanation the paper will then attempt to give a reasonable way of dealing with deforestation.

3. Noah and his older sister walk down the dirt road to the beginning of the forest path, their first such walk since having gotten back from America, where they stayed for four years. As they walk, Noah remembers the forest hikes he used to take; how the edge of the forest was like a three hundred foot wall of vegetation and as soon as you entered it twilight enveloped you, how the trees would tower on all sides massive and ancient. Now as he turned onto the path he was disappointed to find that beyond the initial trees there was a large cleared area with nothing but ferns growing, an old field abandoned because of the inefficiency of the slash-and-burn methods used to clear it. After crossing the massive cleared area, the two of them enter the forest, but this forest is not like Noah remembers it. This forest is made of sparse trees with little undergrowth. Further on the forest abruptly stops, opening into a clearing the size of a town. This clearing is almost devoid of standing trees, most of them having been cut down by the loggers who recently went through. As Noah and his sister pick their way across the area they come upon one of the objects of all the destruction, one of the giant rainforest trees. Three hundred feet tall and ten feet in diameter, it is lying on the ground with one fifteen foot section taken out of its trunk to be cut into boards; the rest is left to rot on the forest floor.

Phillip Anderton, long time African missionary and naturalist, used to quote the statistic that eighty percent of the wood cut down by loggers is wasted. A shocking statistic when one realizes the extent to which deforestation has been carried on in some countries. In Haiti only one 1.4 percent of the land is still covered in forests, a figure down from 30 percent early last century (McClintock 2). Many other countries are well on their way to joining Haiti in near total deforestation. Something must be done to slow this damaging rate of destruction.

Interestingly enough, the last lead is the one I wrote before I read the exercise. As I was reading the different types of leads in my textbook I noticed that the example for the scene lead the book used destruction of tropical rainforests as an example topic, and talked about describing what the land looks like after the loggers have left. I must be doing something right!