Brazil’s Rainforest
Commonly referred to as the “lungs of the world”, the Amazon rainforest is the largest in the world. Sixty percent of the Amazon Rainforest is found in Brazil. It is estimated that 20 percent of the world’s oxygen is produced by this area alone. It gives you an idea of just how important it is to preserve this natural wonder.
The Amazon Rainforest is the drainage basin for the Amazon River. To give you something to gauge its size, the Amazon River is the largest river in the world. That is actually an understatement. If you took the next eight largest rivers and added their volume together, it still would not match the volume of the Amazon. The rainforest gets a tremendous amount of rainfall each year. Many areas of the world measure rainfall in inches, but there are parts of the rainforest that receive nine feet of rain per year. It may come as a surprise to find that the soil of the rainforest is actually fairly poor. Only the top two inches are rich in nutrients. That is part of the reason why it is such a shame that the forests are being burned to clear the way for agricultural land. The fact is that it is not very valuable as arable land. That’s why so much of the forest gets burned; because new land is needed all the time so that crops will grow and livestock can get enough sustenance to live.
Because of the vastness of the Rainforest, much of it remains less studied than even the bottom of the ocean. It is estimated that half of the world’s animal species are contained in the rainforest. One statistic that is troubling and hard to comprehend is that scientists believe that 130 different species of plant or animal are lost every day. It is difficult even to imagine but the scale of this area is the reason why the numbers are so mind-boggling. For instance, 200,000 acres of rainforest are burned every day. When you covert this into weeks or months you will understand how the loss of species can be so great. At the same time, many new species are being discovered in the rainforest all the time. It is all the more reason to protect the area so that science will have the opportunity to study this biologically diverse land better.
The loss of the Amazon Rainforest can mean more than just losing many species and the ability of the planet to recycle Carbon Dioxide into Oxygen. It can mean that medicines that are discovered or prepared using plant or animal life in the Amazon will be lost as well. There are an estimated 40,000 different plant species living in the Amazon, and many of these could potentially unlock the secrets to cures for diseases that have devastated mankind. Protecting these lands is not only a gift for the people of the world right now, but for generations to come. Nothing could be more valuable for the children of our children than to leave them the rainforests.