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Some version of that question is on the mind of conservationists and tourism businesses in Tanzania, where government officials are going ahead with plans to build a road through the Serengeti National Park despite strong protests from environmental groups around the world.

Last year, Tanzania’s government announced plans to construct a highway through the park as a way to spur economic growth and connect the country’s interior west with commercial activity on the eastern coast. The proposal quickly came under fire from conservation organizations and UNESCO officials (the Serengeti is a World Heritage site) who worried that the highway would disrupt the yearly migration of two million wildebeest and zebra that travel north from the Tanzanian national park to the adjacent Masai Mara reserve in Kenya.

In July, Tanzanian officials announced a kind of compromise: They would still build the road, but all traffic would be controlled by park rangers and the road would not be paved.

“The project is still there without a shadow of a doubt. But the road will be unpaved, so there will be no tarmac road or highway traversing through the Serengeti National Park,” says Natural Resources and Tourism Minister Ezekiel Maige.

According to the new plan, rangers will set up checkpoints and control the flow of traffic through the 33-mile section of the road cutting across the wilderness area. The road is part of a planned 260-mile route between Arusha, near Mount Kilimanjaro, and Musoma, on Lake Victoria. Roads outside the national park would be paved, but roads leading into the park and those inside it would not be.

“The road will be closely supervised. [The park rangers] will put up gates and carry out regular patrols to ensure no harm comes to the wildlife population as a result of vehicles that will be allowed to pass through the road,” Maige says.

Many conservationists are still unhappy with the plan. They have been pushing for an alternative route that would run south of Serengeti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation area and leave the existing gravel route for administrative and tourism purposes only. Although an unpaved road would force cars to drive more slowly than they would on asphalt, roadkill would be inevitable – and in this area, roadkill comes at an especially high price. One animal that road opponents worry would suffer is the black rhinoceros, which is endangered. According to an environmental impact study on the proposed road, which was leaked earlier this year, black rhinoceros would be particularly at risk from collisions. The report also stated that the project “may impact the migration of the wildebeest and this would diminish the unique value of the Serengeti as a World Heritage site.

MontanaToursCR.com » Importance of Rainforests

The beauty, majesty, and timelessness of a primary rainforest are indescribable. It is impossible to capture on film, to describe in words, or to explain to those who have never had the awe-inspiring experience of standing in the heart of a primary rainforest.

Rainforests have evolved over millions of years to turn into the incredibly complex environments they are today. Rainforests represent a store of living and breathing renewable natural resources that for eons, by virtue of their richness in both animal and plant species, have contributed a wealth of resources for the survival and well-being of humankind. These resources have included basic food supplies, clothing, shelter, fuel, spices, industrial raw materials, and medicine for all those who have lived in the majesty of the forest. However, the inner dynamics of a tropical rainforest is an intricate and fragile system. Everything is so interdependent that upsetting one part can lead to unknown damage or even destruction of the whole. Sadly, it has taken only a century of human intervention to destroy what nature designed to last forever.

The scale of human pressures on ecosystems everywhere has increased enormously in the last few decades. Since 1980 the global economy has tripled in size and the world population has increased by 30 percent. Consumption of everything on the planet has risen- at a cost to our ecosystems. In 2001, The World Resources Institute estimated that the demand for rice, wheat, and corn is expected to grow by 40% by 2020, increasing irrigation water demands by 50% or more. They further reported that the demand for wood could double by the year 2050; unfortunately, it is still the tropical forests of the world that supply the bulk of the world’s demand for wood.

In 1950, about 15 percent of the Earth’s land surface was covered by rainforest. Today, more than half has already gone up in smoke. In fewer than fifty years, more than half of the world’s tropical rainforests have fallen victim to fire and the chain saw, and the rate of destruction is still accelerating. Unbelievably, more than 200,000 acres of rainforest are burned every day. That is more than 150 acres lost every minute of every day, and 78 million acres lost every year! More than 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest is already gone, and much more is severely threatened as the destruction continues. It is estimated that the Amazon alone is vanishing at a rate of 20,000 square miles a year. If nothing is done to curb this trend, the entire Amazon could well be gone within fifty years.

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