The Amazon Rainforest, 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 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 Institution indicates that about eighty percent of all the plant and animal species extant in the world today reside in the Amazon Rainforest and depend upon its complex ecology. In just a few acres three hundred tree species will be growing to heights of a hundred fifty feet or more in multileveled emergent tree level, upper and lower canopy and understory. Each level harbors a particular constellation of plant and animal life.
In addition to serving as the "Heart and Lungs" of the Planet, the Amazon Rainforest constitutes the worlds larges "pharmacy" yielding thousands of previously unknown substances found nowhere 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 rosemary periwinkle for the treatment of leukemia increasing children’s survival from twenty to eighty percent, and this plant is now extinct in the wild.
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 it the web of life. Like the rainforest itself, its indigenous inhabitants offer something unique to the world, for they are the repository of 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 looses a unique and valuable organ for knowing itself and its ecosystems. Preserving the Amerindians and their cultures is an asset to all.