SAVE OUR RAINFORESTS

Excerpted from, The Healing Power of Rainforest Herbs
(Square One Publishers, Inc. Garden City, NY 11040, © Copyrighted 2004) 
By Leslie Taylor

AMAZON RAINFOREST…THE LAST FRONTIER ON EARTH If Amazonia were a country, it would be the ninth largest in the world. The Amazon rainforest, the world’s greatest remaining natural resource, is the most powerful and bio-actively diverse natural phenomenon on the planet. It has been described as the “lungs of our planet” because it provides the essential service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. It is estimated that more than 20 percent of Earth’s oxygen is produced in this area.

The Amazon covers more than 1.2 billion acres, and is found in nine South American countries: Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, French Guiana, and Suriname. With 2.5 million square miles of rainforest, the Amazon rainforest represents 54 percent of the total rainforests left on Earth.

Largest Collection of Plant and Animal Species The Amazon rainforest contains the largest collection of living plant and animal species in the world. The diversity of plant species in the Amazon rainforest is the highest on Earth. 

Key to Tomorrow’s Cures? Rainforests currently provide sources for one-fourth of today’s medicines, and 70 percent of the plants found to have anticancer properties are found only in the rainforest. The rainforest and its immense undiscovered biodiversity hold the key to unlocking tomorrow’s cures for devastating diseases.

Read all the fascinating story at www.rain-tree.com/facts.htm

Other Resource links include: www.Rainforestweb.org www.Rainforestweb.org

www.Rainforest-Alliance.org www.Rainforest-Alliance.org

Editorial Note: I believe that it is in our best interest to educate ourselves especially in global matters such as the rainforest. I hope you will take a few moments and read about all the benefits our forests have afforded us and how they are now in danger of being destroyed. Let us not lose one of our greatest resources.

Michelene