To preserve and protect the Amazon Rainforest for future generations and the well-being of the planet through significant land purchases and the creation of guarded preserves. To foster global awareness of the importance of the rainforest through education and research in an effort to mobilize support for its preservation. To enlist the support of other landowners in preserving virgin rainforest and practicing sustainable methods for land use.

Since 1991, the Amazon International Rainforest Reserve or AIRR has devoted its energies and resources to the preservation of a small but significant portion of the Brazilian Rainforest in the state of Amazonia in northern Brazil. In keeping with its international character, the board and staff is comprised of Brazilian citizens and leaders in ecological business practices, international relations and environmental education. AIRR also joins hands with other conservation groups and agencies working towards the same goals.

Sustainable gathering of fruit, nuts and latex brings continuous surveillance to the reserve through mobile gatherers and rubber tappers in whose interest it is to preserve the rainforest in its present form.

The indigenous peoples who live within or near the area are guaranteed the freedom to practice their low impact ways as they have through the centuries. They are also insulated from the inevitability of having to confront the dominant society in other more lethal ways.

Amazon International Rainforest Reserve seeks to intensify international attention and interest in the plight of the rainforest and generate financial support in order to purchase sustainable tracts of rainforest land in order to make a tangible difference in preserving the integrity of this vital and essential ecosystem. It also functions as the responsible and caring guardian for these lands into perpetuity through the careful monitoring of its boundaries.

To preserve an additional million acres in Amazon Rainforest in its present pristine natural state including the hundred thousand plant and animal species living there. Establishing a gene pool and research resource for future discoveries.

"We did not inherit the earth from our parents. We are borrowing it from our children."

The Amazon Rainforest is the largest rainforest and richest ecosystem on earth, has stood inviolate for thousands of years since its creation. The profusion and variety of life forms present in th rainfoest and its critical role to supplying the world with air has resulted in its being called the "Heart and Lungs" of the Planet. Indeed the majority of the world's oxygen is supplied by its dense foliage and teeming plant life which upon first inspection seems boundless and indestructible.

A recent study by the Smithsonian Institution indicates that about 80% of all of the plant and animal species extant in the world today reside in the Amazon Rainforest and depend upon its complex ecology. With certain trees growing to a height of 150 feet or more, the rainforest is multi-leveled with an emergent tree level, upper and lower canopy and under-story. Each level harbors a particular constellation of plant and animal life with over a hundred species per acre.

In addition to serving as the "Heart and Lungs" of the planet, the Amazon Rainforest constitutes the world's "largest pharmacy" yielding thousands of previously unknown substances found no where else. Twenty-Five percent of our pharmaceuticals come from the Amazon, making its value to humanity as a laboratory of natural phenomena and as a medical storehouse, priceless.

As a gene pool and the origin of the majority of our fruits and vegetables, the Amazon is invaluable for feeding the world today and tomorrow with disease resistant crops.

Finally, the Amazon Rainforest is home to numerous indigenous people who depend on it for their very existence and the survival of their entire race.

Today, scarcely twenty-five years after the intensification of development, the rainforest has shrunk twenty percent, a football field per second or 10,000 acres everyday. Falling to chainsaws and bulldozers for ranches, farms and industries, the rainforest having little topsoil, due to its rapid cycle of decomposition, cannot renew itself and becomes a giant wasteland. Fires visible from outer space now dot the landscape, where once stood a green bastion reaching toward the sky, lie cremated trees and smoldering animal corpses.