Paragraph Summaries
- Forests are valuable for the economy and also the environment. But there are two specific environmental claims we should focus on: the claim that forests renew oxygen, and the claim the forests have a big role in preserving biodiversity.
- Trees do produce oxygen in photosynthesis when alive, but they consume it when they die and decompose. Trees are net neutral in terms of oxygen production.
- Some claim that forests preserve essential diversity, including plants which may fight disease. We also might argue we have an intrinsic moral imperative to keep biodiversity alive.
- It turns out forests aren’t happening as fast as claimed. Though some counter that many tropical forests are commercial forests which are less diverse. But, these reduce the pressure to cut old growth forests. Further, these commercial forests aren’t as big as people claim: only 3% of forests.
Analysis
The facts you need to know are in the analysis above. If you have a firm grasp on them, the questions are comparatively easy: this is one of the easier passages in the section.
However, there are two possible difficulties to getting a full understanding: scientific subject matter, and outside ideas about forests and environmentalism. So, let’s examine the passages part by part. (However, if you understand the summaries well, you can just skip to the questions)
First Paragraph: Setup
The first paragraph is really just setup. At an advanced level, you should be able to infer that the author thinks it is not a big deal to cut forests, and we shouldn’t worry too much about their loss (the questions don’t test this however). The keyword is “however” coming after the benefits of forests: this shows the author is contrasting their view from the benefits. Also, the author is placing two environmental ideas under “scrutiny”, a skeptical negative word.
So, the author is a pro-logging policy analyst who is making economic arguments to policy makers. Lines 10-12 state this directly, and this provides the answer to question 1.
Lines 3-9 are worth mentioning. hey have a lot of details that aren’t really relevant to the structure of the passage. You can compress those lines to [economic and ecological benefits of forests] and understand the passage just as well. I pretty much did that, and didn’t retain the info in that section on my first read.
But, you do need to know where that info is. Question 7 has answers that mention specific information about forests. When this question raised the issue, I looked to lines 3-9, and found the answer to the question there. So, that’s the kind of information you don’t have to memorize, but you do have to know where to look for in case a question mentions it.
Paragraph 2: Oxygen
Paragraph 2 is about oxygen. It says there are two parts to a forest’s oxygen cycle:
- Tree growth. Trees produce oxygen and store carbon dioxide during photosynthesis
- Tree death. Trees consume oxygen as they die.
So actually, trees aren’t really the lungs of the earth. Their net oxygen production is zero.
You don’t need to know anything else about this paragraph, though the questions do test your ability to have understood that photosynthesis is what drives oxygen production.
Paragraph 3: Arguments about biodiversity
Paragraph 3 has three parts:
- An argument that we need stricter forest preservation policy to preserve biodiversity
- An argument that biodiversity can benefit humanity by helping us find new medications
- An argument that even if biodiversity doesn’t benefit us, we have a moral obligation to protect it.
The author actually only disagrees with the first argument. In lines 41-45, when they say “Actually….deforestation is not…as fast as has…been claimed” they are making the argument that we don’t need stricter policy.
So the author has no opinion on whether we need biodiversity for medicine, or whether we have a moral obligation to protect biodiversity. The only thing I’d like you to know about those two section is the moral difference between the two types of argument.
Consider the following, which gives two reasons for helping the poor: “We should help the poor. In doing so, the crime rate will go down, as richer people have a lower crime rate. And it is our moral duty to help the poor”.
People often blend these. The first kind is based on naked self interest: “Do my policy because you will get new medicine from plants/there will be less crime”
The second kind is based on moral obligation. It brings no benefit to the person doing it:
“Protect the forests, because we have a duty to biodiversity/Support the poor, because we have a duty to help them”
So there is both a moral argument to protecting forests, and also a self interested one (medicine).
Paragraph 4: The extend of deforestation and commercial forests
The final paragraph is the most complex. Essentially, critics have a two part argument:
- Deforestation is happening too fast, and
- Too large a percent of forests are commercial forests with little biodiversity
(Note: when I say “two part”, I don’t mean they’re presented in the paragraph in that order. I just mean this is the argument we can infer that environmentalists are making, because they’re the claims the author responds to)
The author has three parts to their reply:
- Statistics show deforestation isn’t happening that fast.
- This is partly because of commercial forests. It’s true they are less diverse, but the existence of commercial forests reduces pressure on natural forests.
- Also, commercial forests aren’t that big. Contrary to environmentalist claims, only 3% of forests are commercial forests.
Commercial forests are the important bit. The author wants to reframe commercial forests for environmentalists. They focus on the negative: the forests aren’t diverse.
But the positive side is that loggers log the commercial forests over and over again, and thus they don’t have to cut down new forests. So, the presence of small commercial forests means loggers don’t have to log old growth forest.
And they are small: only three percentage.
I want to be clear about one distinction: the author isn’t arguing biodiversity loss is not a problem. Instead, their argument in paragraph 4 is that is isn’t a big problem. (and may be outweighed by economic benefits)
The size of a problem matters. We only need to take action is a problem is large enough to cause concern. The author is implying that current deforestation shouldn’t be concerning. But, it’s still a problem.
i.e. Suppose people dropped ten pieces of litter in America in a year. That would still be bad, but it wouldn’t really be worth doing anything about. We care about litter because people drop a LOT of it, much more than ten pieces.
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