The Paradox of Paradise
 If you walked through various tropical rainforests of the world, you'd see
bright flowers, colorful birds, trees, vines, shrubs, flowers, mammals,
marsupials [see glossary] (opossum, tree-kangaroo, etc.), reptiles, fish and
thousands of kinds of insects. Each rainforest is a paradise.
Paradise is fragile, however. The delicate balance between all the different
kinds of the life inside the forest is easily disturbed. If we remove one life
form, or shrink the area of the rain forest, the life of the whole forest is
threatened.
Here are two Discovery Activities!
| The Life of the Soil | The Great Food Myth |
| Open Now | Grand Opening March 3, 1997 |
| Looking at all of the trees, plants,
vines and shrubs that grow in a rain
forest, you would probably guess that
the soil is extremely fertile. But, rain
forest soil is not rich at all. If you cut
down a section of trees and planted
crops, after a few years the crops
would fail and the soil would be
completely destroyed. | We depend on rain forests for many
of the foods we eat. Many of our
favorite foods such as bananas and
chocolate came from the rain forest.
You could say that the "original
recipe" for these foods came from the
rainforest. In the future, if we don't
protect those "recipes" we could end
up with a food crisis on our hands. |
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