The Amazon Rainforest, the largest and richest ecosystem on earth, has stood inviolate for thousands if not millions of years since its creation. The profusion and variety of life forms present in the rainforest and its critical role in 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 Institute indicates that about 90% of all the plant and animal species existent in the world today reside in the Amazon Rainforst and depend upon its complex ecology. Unlike the forests of temperate zones that are populated by stands of a single or double species of tree, the tropical rainforest will in a two and half acre plot harbor as many as 283 tree species. With certain trees growing to a height of 150 ft. or more, the rainforest is multileveled with an emergent tree level, upper and lower canopy and understory. Each level harbors a particular constellation of plant and animal life.
Human beings have only begun to catalog and name the creatures that live here. Home to thousands of varieties of flowering plants, the rainforest supports endless varieties of hummingbirds, butterflies and insects such as the rhinoceros beetle and the army ant. It is also home to the spider monkey, pink and gray dolphins, Amazon river otter, piranha, anaconda, jaguar, blue and yellow macaw, toucan, harpy eagle, fishing bat, tapir sloth, tarantula, Cayman crocodile, manatee, etc.
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. Compounds from tropical flora relieve headaches, help treat glaucoma and provide muscle relaxants used during surgery. The Amazon Rainforest has also yielded quinine for the treatment of malaria and periwinkle for the treatment of leukemia. Given the rainforest's teeming biological diversity, its value to humanity as a laboratory of natural phenomena and as a medical storehouse is priceless. Conversely, if the rainforest disappears, researchers fear that plants with wonder-drug potential will be lost forever.
In addition to these functions, the Amazon Rainforest attracts huge volumes of precipitation from the Atlantic ocean, 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 9000 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.
As the greatest repository of nature's treasures and most significant source of air, the Amazon Rainforest is crucial to the survival of all life on the planet and to human beings' understanding of their place in the web of life. In the words of Guatama Buddha, "The forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously, the products of its like and activity. It affords protection to all living beings."
Before the arrival of Europeans and up to the third decade of this century, the Amazon Rainforest covered nearly 845 million acres in what is today Brazil, parts of Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador. Brazil has the greatest amount of tropical forest in the world. It is also experiencing the worst losses: between twelve million and twenty two million acres a year, according to the World Resources Institute.
The completion of a road linking Brasilia, the capital, to the port city Belem in the early 1960's underscored the governments commitment to settle the hinterlands. The road is part of a network that supports the push into the interior. As a consequence, Brazil's rainforest is being decimated by a vast army of homesteaders, farmers, ranchers and corporate interests that include large scale mining.
Drilling and mining leave scars, and farmers find that raising crops quickly exhausts the thin soil of cleared forest land. Many farmers merely abandon their plots and clear new ones. The cultivation of coca for illicit cocaine production leaves rivers polluted with chemicals. The extraction of gold and other metals fouls waterways with mercury and other toxins used in processing.
Today, scarcely twenty years since the intensification of the development of the rainforest, it has shrunk to 88% of its original size. It is estimated that each second an area the size of a football field is destroyed, adding to the daily toll of approximately fifty thousand acres. In one year, an area the size of Italy is decimated and made uninhabitable to nearly all forms of life. Already thousands of plant and animal species about whom little was known have been irrevocably lost to the bulldozer, the chain saw and to the slash and burn methods employed by regional farmers, ranchers, and miners.
Although its arboreal canopy reaches hundreds of feet into the air, the rainforest and its groves of giant trees are in fact rooted in very shallow soil and exist in a fragile balance. The rainforest experiences an abbreviated life cycle in which the creation of top soil is bypassed through the efficient decomposing activities of tropical bacteria and fungi. Rather than collecting in the soil, the nutrients are absorbed by the trees. A layer of nutrient-poor soil in the rainforest is generally less than four inches deep. Unlike other forests around the world, the rainforest once disturbed, cannot renew itself, remaining instead a barren sandy wasteland subject to erosion.
A manifestation and cause of the current crisis in the rainforest is the rash of forest fires ignited by homesteaders and speculators which burn day and night in every direction in the vast Brazilian Rainforest landscape. These events register clearly as sizable flares on images taken by satellite from outer space. from a closer vantage point, however, the images are more graphic. Where once was a green bastion reaching toward the sky, lie smoldering animal corpses and cremated trees.
In 1987, in the southern state of Rondonia, 80,600 square kilometers of rainforest, an area one fifth the size of California went up in smoke. At the current rate of destruction, parts of the Amazon promise to turn into great stretches of desert within our lifetime. The repercussions of this activity are global. As the rainforest gets smaller, it is less able to supply the world with much needed oxygen or to absorb as much carbon dioxide contributing to global warming and the greenhouse effect. The burning forest adds even more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere jeopardizing the stability of ecosystems worldwide.
Unfortunately, these attacks on the rainforst are generally sanctioned by the governments of countries that harbor the rainforest much like the westward expansion and the destruction of important North American ecosystems were sanctioned by the United States government nearly a century earlier. Even where it is illegal to clear the rainforest, the law enforcement agencies are simply inadequate to stop the destruction.
In the case of the United States, the process of destruction would have eventually overtaken all of the country's great forests and their accompanying natural resources had it not been for the foresight of individuals such as John Muir, John Rockefeller and John Doe who took it upon themselves to preserve huge tracts of forested land,, particularly in the West. These, they set aside in the form of nature preserves or reserves. Protected from the westward migration of the American people and the aggressiveness of commerce and industry, the preserves later became the basis for the country's vast system of national parks and forests which has insured the integrity of ecosystems such as Yellowstone and Yosemite to this day.
Given the immense size of the Amazon Rainforest, its disregard for international boundaries and the gravity of the threat that besieges it, only immediate, massive and concerted efforts on the part of a broad international base of citizens and organizations can rescue it in time to preserve it as the indispensable "Heart and Lungs" of the world.