The importance of the Amazon Rainforest to us all

I know I do not need to inform you of the importance of the Amazon Rainforest, but other people need to be made aware why it is so important to the whole world as it contains more than half of the planet's remaining tropical rainforest, one-fifth of our global freshwater, and as much as one-third of the world's biodiversity and we need to do everything we can to stop de-forestation now, not in 20 or 30 years time after the forest has been devastated and to use the huge benefits the forest has to over mankind especially in medical terms.


I totally support ideas to use and replace the fruits, nuts, plants and even trees as long as we take only what can easily be replaced and stop the greed humans suffer from. Living as I have done in Brasil for 5 years and seeing the vast empty space in NE Brasil, I am saddened to think the only reason deforestation on the scale is happening in the Amazon is because it is easier to get away with it there and it must be cheaper to use the fertile land there instead of concentrating on turning the land we have here into grazing land, when I see what man can achieve around the world, why does everything have to revolve around more profit.

I often think of the quotation from the film ‘The Matrix’ - ‘I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure'.


When I was about 10 or 11 years old I bought my first two books from the school book club, I cannot tell you what one of the books was about but I still remember to this day, 40 years later, the first one I read and re-read many times was about the ‘Amazon Rainforest’. As someone who was brought up on the ‘legend of Tarzan’ to discover this other land not in Africa but with exotic animals such as flesh eating piranha fish (I now know most piranha fish are actually fruit eating and there has never been a recorded human death by a piranha fish) anaconda snakes which could get you in the water as well as on land, jaguars both black and spotty, massive caiman (jacaré as the Brasilians call them) related to my old favourite the crocodile (How many times had I watched Tarzan kill one to save innocent people), electric eels (Puraque), Stingray fish, vampire bats, soldier ants, poisonous frogs and killer bees, of course over the years I learned about the not so scary or dangerous animals and insects the region was home too, pink dolphins, manatee, sloths, toucans, the harpy eagle, large colourful butterflies, and Tamarind the smallest monkey.