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.
Moreover, the rainforest is home to some one hundred thousand Indian people, the remnant of innumerable tribes which have held out against the ravages of five hundred years of conquest and colonization by Europeans. Since Europeans first appeared in Brazil, nearly 90% of Amazonian Indian people have disappeared. In the last ten years alone, the Yanomani Indian homeland has been reduced by government decree from 36,000 to 800 square miles in response to an invasion of 45,000 gold prospectors into their territory. When the invasion began, there were about 9,000 Yanomani. Today they are dying in large numbers from tuberculosis, hepatitis, malaria and venereal disease.
Like the rainforest itself, its indigenous inhabitants offer something unique to the world, for they are the repository of an ancient, intimate and all encompassing understanding of the natural world of which they are a part. With the loss of the rainforest and its original inhabitants, humankind loses a unique and valuable organ for knowing itself and its ecosystems. As an example, the Yanomani, the largest group of unassimilated Indians in Brazil, speak a language unrelated to any other spoken in the Amazon basin or anywhere else on earth. Their world view is synonymous with the Rainforest itself.