LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Rainforest: Amazon Rainforest
built 633 days ago
Once a vast sea of tropical forest, the Amazon rainforest today is scarred by roads, farms, ranches, and dams. Brazil is gifted with a full third of the world's remaining rainforests; unfortunately, it is ... one of the world's great rainforest destroyers, burning or felling more than 2.7 million acres each year. More than 20 percent of rainforest in the Amazon has been razed and is gone forever. This ocean of green, nearly as large as Australia, is the last great rainforest in the known universe and it is being decimated like the others before it. Why? Like other rainforests already lost forever, the land is being cleared for logging timber, large-scale cattle ranching, mining operations, government road building and hydroelectric schemes, military operations, and the subsistence agriculture of peasants and landless settlers. Sadder still, in many places the rainforests are burnt simply to provide charcoal to power industrial plants in the area.
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WASHINGTON, April 19 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- World Wildlife Fund today named a native Peruvian who specializes on the Amazon rainforest and a marine researcher as its 2007 Fuller Fellows. Dr. Gabriela Nunez-Iturri and Dr. Eric Treml will receive a $50,000 stipend and $15,000 in research funds for two years as well as access to WWF's global network of scientists and conservationists. They will ... have the opportunity to link their post- doctoral research to on-the-ground conservation work at WWF sites.
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Since Amazonian Indians are often the only ones who know both the properties of these plants and how they can best be used, their knowledge is now considered an essential component of all efforts to conserve and develop the rainforest. Since failure to document this lore would represent a tremendous economic and scientific loss to the industrialized world, the bioprospectors are now working side by side with the rainforest tribal shamans and herbal healers to learn the wealth of their plant knowledge. But bioprospecting has a dark side. Indian knowledge that has resisted the pressure of "modernization" is being used by bioprospectors who, like oil companies and loggers destroying the forests, threaten to leave no benefits behind them.
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Amazon rainforest sustainability critically depends upon new soybean production being kept out of ancient primary rainforest ecosystems. Let's continue the commitment of Ecological Internet's Earth Action Network to strongly speak ecological truth to intransigent power. TAKE ACTION!
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A similar number of primitive families are found in all the rainforests of South America, including the Amazon Rainforest. These ancient plant families may hold secrets to a number of unanswered questions regarding the origins of the flowering plants - plants on which the human race depends for food and medicines.
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In Brazil alone, more than 90 indigenous groups have been destroyed by epidemics and Brazilian colonists since the 1900s, and with them have gone centuries of accumulated knowledge of the medicinal value of rainforest species. As indigenous territories continue to be destroyed by deforestation, and ecocide, such as in the Peruvian Amazon[32] indigenous peoples' rainforest communities continue to disappear, while others, like the Urarina continue to struggle to fight for their cultural survival and the fate of their forested territories. Meanwhile, the relationship between nonhuman primates in the subsistence and symbolism of indigenous lowland South American peoples has gained increased attention, as has ethno-biology and community-based conservation efforts.
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Amazon Rainforest