The floods in India's Uttarakhand state have already left more than a thousand people dead and it is expected that as rescuers reach remote villages struck by landslides and as flood waters subside more grim discoveries will be made. Apart from the severity of these early monsoon rains, the worst in some 80 years, there is another reason that the devastation has been so great, which has nothing to do with the power of natural forces. Deforestation high in the Himalayas coupled with the careless use of the resulting arable land has transformed the behavior of floodwaters. Whereas once rainwater would have been caught by woodland and filtered out gently to streams and rivers, it now rushes off hillsides denuded of trees by locals in their search for fuel and their desire to bring more land under cultivation to feed an expanding population. Unfortunately, Indian government officials have noted that all too often the new field systems are not laid out in such a way as to minimize the runoff by the use of limited terracing. Indeed some new fields have been oriented with furrows downhill making it inevitable that not only will rainwater move swiftly downhill, doing little to irrigate crops, but it will also carry large quantities of soil and vegetation with it. India is not the only country to be seriously affected by deforestation. Bangladesh has in the last 20 years suffered grievously from the removal of woodland cover in states upstream on the Ganges and its many tributaries. Historically prone to flooding, Bangladeshis are now having to cope with regular inundations made the worse by rising sea levels. Many low-lying areas of this already crowded country are now being lost beneath permanent floods. Meanwhile, in Malaysia and Singapore pollution levels have reached record dangerous levels thanks to another form of deforestation, this time in Sumatra in Indonesia. Once again the main culprits are peasants seeking to acquire more land for cultivation, though illegal loggers also set forest fires to burn off undergrowth and smaller trees so that they can get at the highly profitable hardwoods. The tragedy for subsistence farmers who cannot afford machinery to clear forest land in a controlled fashion is that the resulting fields are of marginal use. The soil is poor and has been leached of much goodness by the trees. Susceptible to wind and water erosion, it is unlikely ever to be highly productive and, in any case, not for very long. Thus within a few years, the farmers must turn again to more forest burning and the declining environmental cycle continues. The penalty in terms of degradation is the loss of a precious habitat - the world's surviving great forested areas are crucial for carbon sequestration; they help our planet “breathe”. Meanwhile, the unfortunate inhabitants of Singapore and the southern Malaysian states are having severe difficulty breathing the acrid smoke that has drifted over from the uncontrolled forest fires on Sumatra. By all accounts the Indonesian authorities have made a poor fist of extinguishing the blazes using water bombing from aircraft. Nor it seems have they been able to enforce the law against such clearances either through prosecutions or a campaign to point out to the subsistence farmers the folly of their actions. Pollution on this scale from burning Indonesian forests last happened 16 years ago and it was imagined that it would never occur again. The Indonesian authorities have some hard questions to answer.
