a fungus that\u00a0 appears to be quite happy eating plastic in airless landfills<\/a>. This fungus shows a voracious appetite for a very common group of plastics: polyurethane.<\/p>\nHuman beings have only begun to catalog and name the creatures that live here.\u00a0 Home to thousands of varieties of flowering plants, the rainforest supports endless varieties of hummingbirds, butterflies and insects such a the rhinoceros beetle and the army ant.\u00a0 It is also home to the spider monkey, pink and gray dolphins, Amazon river otter, piranha, anaconda, jaguar, blue and yellow macaw, toucan, harpy eagle, fishing bat, tapir sloth, tarantula, Cayman crocodile, manatee, etc.<\/p>\n
The Amazon Rainforest, the largest rainforest and richest ecosystem on earth, has stood inviolate for thousands if not millions of years since its creation.\u00a0 The profusion and variety of life forms present in the rainforest and its critical role in supplying the world with air has resulted in its being called the \u201cHeart and Lungs\u201d of the Planet. Indeed, the majority of the world\u2019s oxygen is supplied by its dense foliage and teeming plant life which upon first inspection, seems boundless and indestructible.<\/p>\n
A recent study by the Smithsonian Institution indicates that about 90% of all of the plant and animal species extant in the world today reside in the Amazon Rainforest and depend upon its complex ecology.\u00a0 As the greatest repository of nature\u2019s treasures and most significant source of air, the Amazon Rainforest is crucial to the survival of all life on the planet and to human beings\u2019 understanding of their place in the web of life.\u00a0 In the words of Guatama Buddha, \u201cThe forest is a peculiar organism of unlimited kindness and benevolence that makes no demands for its sustenance and extends generously, the products of its life and activity.\u00a0 It affords protection to all living beings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Before the arrival of Europeans and up to the third decade of this century, the Amazon Rainforest covered nearly 45 million acres in what is today Brazil, parts of Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and Ecuador.\u00a0 Brazil has the greatest amount of tropical forest in the world.\u00a0 It is also experiencing the worse losses:\u00a0 between twelve million and twenty two million acres a year, according to the World Resources Institute.<\/p>\n
Brazil\u2019s rainforest is being decimated by a vast army of homesteaders, farmers, ranchers and corporate interests that include large scale mining and intensive farming. Drilling and mining leave scars, and farmers find that raising crops quickly exhausts the thin soil of cleared forest land.\u00a0 Many farmers merely abandon their plots and clear new ones.\u00a0 The cultivation of crop production leaves rivers polluted with chemicals.\u00a0 The extraction of gold and other metals fouls waterways with mercury and other toxins used in processing.<\/p>\n
Today, scarcely twenty years since the intensification of the development of the rainforest, it has shrunk to 88% of its original size.\u00a0 It is estimated that each second, an area the size of a football field is destroyed, adding to the daily toll of approximately fifty thousand acres.\u00a0 In one year, an area the size of Italy is decimated and made uninhabitable to nearly all forms of life.\u00a0 Already thousands of plant and animal species about whom little was known have been irrevocably lost to the bulldozer, the chain saw and to the slash and burn methods employed by regional farmers, ranchers and miners.<\/p>\n
Although its arboreal canopy reaches hundreds of feet into the air, the rainforest and its groves of giant trees are in fact rooted in very shallow soil and exist in a fragile balance.\u00a0 The rainforest experiences an abbreviated life cycle in which the creation of top soil is bypassed through the efficient decomposing activities of tropical bacteria and fungi.\u00a0 Rather than collecting in the soil, the nutrients are absorbed by the trees.\u00a0 A layer of nutrient-poor soil in the rainforest is generally less than four inches deep.\u00a0 Unlike other forests around the world, the rainforest once disturbed, cannot renew itself, remaining instead a barren sandy wasteland subject to erosion.<\/p>\n
At the current rate of destruction, parts of the Amazon promise to turn into great stretches of desert within our lifetime.\u00a0 The repercussions of this activity are global.\u00a0 As the rainforest gets smaller, it is less able to supply the world with much needed oxygen or to absorb as much carbon dioxide contributing to global warming and the greenhouse effect.\u00a0 The burning forest adds even more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere jeopardizing the stability of ecosystems worldwide.<\/p>\n
Given the immense size of the Amazon Rainforest and it’s unimaginable bio-diversity, we have just begun to scratch the surface of the solutions residing within. If we can find cures for cancer, malaria, polyurethane waste and more; perhaps it holds the ability to cure the incomprehensible problem we face today of plastic fragments choking our oceans? What other mysteries lie hidden within the green foliage and moist soil?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For decades we have known that the Amazon is home to more species than almost anywhere else on Earth. Amazon Rainforest constitutes the world\u2019s largest \u201cpharmacy\u201d yielding thousands of previously unknown substances found no where else.\u00a0 Compounds from tropical flora relieve headaches, help treat glaucoma and provide muscle relaxants used during surgery.\u00a0 The Amazon Rainforest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[736],"tags":[77,194,1466,75,452,805,1465,291,42],"class_list":["post-718","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environmental-news","tag-biodegradable","tag-biodegradable-plastic","tag-bioplastic","tag-earth-friendly","tag-going-green","tag-natural","tag-plastic-news","tag-sustainability","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=718"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":754,"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718\/revisions\/754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=718"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=718"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ensoplastics.com\/theblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=718"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}