Vanishing Amazonia

I'm willing to bet that you've heard about the Amazon rainforest before this. You've probably already seen it before on some documentary that you watched a few seconds/minutes of before you changed the channel, sick of hearing about how bad the situation there is. Well, it's time to face facts.
Why is it important to save the Amazon rainforest? For starters, it covers 6 million square kilometers - an area almost as big as Australia. It holds around one fifth of all flowering plant species in the world, a fifth of all bird species, and one in ten mammals. To add one last worrying reason to the list, its natural vegetation continuously turns carbon dioxide into oxygen. The Amazon rainforest, also known as Amazonia, has been called the 'Lungs Of Our Planet'. Do I really need to say any more about how important it is?
What are we up against? We're actually up against the locals. The people in the Amazon region are really poor - they live in slum city. There are many slums near the river in places like Manaus (this leads to pollution of the waterways) , which has a population of 1.4 million. Anyway, because they are so poor, and because that crowd of people all need the local forest to provide food and firewood, they fell the trees to sell. Timber fetches a high price, and they are very poor...
Another cause for concern is large areas of the forest have been cleared to create grasslands, where cattle herds now graze. With no trees, the soil is poor and streams dry up in the hottest season.

Estimates say that around a sixth of the Amazon rainforest has already been cleared. In 2004 alone, 26,000 square kilometers were cleared - that's a land area bigger than Wales.