The night is deep and black with tiny phosphorescent leaves, molds and bugs shining like stars. The night is as noisy as a thousand birds, but instead of chirps and whistles, there are the buzzes, clicks, and beeps of insects and the occasional hysterical cry of an owl or the deep loud hoot of a giant fruit dove.

Rivulets of crystal water
gush down the sides of my tarpaulin and
splash into pools of decayed leaves,
between roots of trees
in the emerald twilight of a rainforest.

The rainforest doesn't talk.
It doesn't need to.

It whispers
with a thousand stirring leaves,
"I am at peace."

The Amazon Rainforest attracts huge volumes of precipitation by releasing it in endless cycles of rain and tropical downpours that give the rainforest its name. Averaging from 80 to 120 inches annually, the Amazon Rainforest channels and provides drainage for the Amazon River, the world's largest river and source of 25% of the world's fresh water supply.

Destruction of the Amazon rainforest is occurring two to three times more rapidly than previously estimated. Conservatively, 16 percent of the original forest is already gone.

A new study in the journal, Nature, says that the rate of destruction of the Amazon rainforest is two to three times greater than previous estimates based on the satellite analysis.

The Brazilian Amazon rainforest is the largest rainforest with the richest ecosystem on earth. It plays a crucial role in supplying the world with air, medications, fresh water, food, vegetation, and wildlife.

The Amazon is the heart and lungs of our planet. The majority of the worlds oxygen is supplied by its dense foliage and teeming plant life which upon first inspection, seems boundless and indestructible.

Since the end of the 1980’s an area of vegetation larger than the size of France has already vanished in the Amazon due to fires or chain saws. This loss is so great because there is no other place on earth with such a vast variety of plant, bird, fish and insect species.

The Amazon is burning from man-made fires at an alarming rate of a football field per second.

Yellowstone Park would burn in a month, Manhattan would disappear in an hour.

We are aware of the destruction, yet the rate of destruction dramatically increases every year.

I decided to do a little research to see just why I should care about a rainforest I have never seen. Does the destruction of such a forest really affect me? How and why does it affect me? The research I did, and the things I found amazed me. This is some of what I discovered.

The Amazon is an exotic place in a distant land so why is the Amazon important to me?

-- First, the Amazon is the largest forest, richest ecosystem in the world. More plant and animal species exist here than in the rest of the world combined.