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.
Today, scarcely twenty years since the intensification of the development of the rainforest, it has shrunk to 80% of its original size. It is estimated that each second, an area the size of a football field is destroyed, adding the daily total to approximately 50,000 acres.
If the destruction and decimation of the Amazon rainforest does not halt, then the resources that we so depend upon will be eliminated and the priceless land will soon be a faint memory.
The Amazon is the richest ecosystem on earth. According to the Smithsonian Institute about 90% of all plant and animal species reside in the Amazon Rainforest.
On the space shuttle astronauts view earth as a beautiful blue planet, a gem set in a universe, from this vantage point only two man-made creations are visible. One is the Great Wall of China and the other The Great Forest Fires of the Amazon.
From a closer vantage point the images become more graphic, where once were monkeys swinging and birds singing in a green bastion reaching toward the sky, lie smoldering trees and cremated animal corpses.
"As millions of acres of forest are burned and cleared away, a vast wasteland is being created incapable of supporting anything"
--Jacque Cousteu