Comfortably Unaware Read Online Free Page A

of over ninety different Amazonian tribes. 32
    Descendants of the Amerindians have lived in the rainforest for some 20,000 years, with traditions that have allowed them to exist in harmony with the forest without destroying it. 33 Today, with massive destruction due to our demand for meat, there are fewer than 250,000 native people living in the Amazon forests, where there were once more than six million. 34 Many scientists believe there are as many as fifty different indigenous groups still living in the depths of the forests that have never had contact with the outside world. As these ancient forests are cleared to make room for cattle or feed crops for livestock, habitat is lost to tribes and their sustainable way of traditional life. Once the forests die, so do the Amazonian people. These tribes, with their medicine men, or shamans, have a wealth of knowledge, particularly the medicinal properties of the thousands of plants found in the rainforests—knowledge that will die with them. A single tribe may use more than two hundred species of plants for medicinal purposes alone. 35 Because of our demand for meat, there has been needless destruction of ancient rainforests. With this, there has been the unfortunate loss of indigenous tribes and their shamans. And when a medicine man dies, the world loses thousands of years of knowledge that is irreplaceable … but at least you get a burger out of it.
    Perhaps destroying living things and creating extinction of species still does not hit home, so let’s look at another aspect: over two thousand plants have been discovered in the rainforests that have anti-cancer properties. All botanists agree that not only are there many thousands more to be discovered but that many species are lost daily as the forests are destroyed to provide meat for the world. Medicines derived from the rainforest include:
    â€¢Â Â curare (muscle relaxant used in surgery)
    â€¢Â Â diosgenin (birth control, arthritis, asthma)
    â€¢Â Â ouabain (heart medicine)
    â€¢Â Â quinine (malaria, pneumonia)
    â€¢Â Â emetine (bronchitis, dysentery)
    â€¢Â Â vincristine (Hodgkin’s disease, leukemia, and other cancers)
    Vincristine is extracted from the rainforest plant periwinkle and is one of the most powerful anti-cancer drugs. It dramatically increases the survival rate for acute childhood leukemia. One-fourth of all prescription drugs and over 70 percent of all cancer treatment medications originate from the rainforest. 36 It makes no sense whatsoever to destroy rainforests and all the life they contain to raise cattle or grow crops to feed animals, when plants can be grown elsewhere for us to use directly as food.
    Plants in general and rainforests in particular serve as natural sinks for atmospheric carbon dioxide, sequestering and storing it in vegetation and the soil. The destruction of vegetation leads to carbon release, loss of the ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and loss of the ability to create oxygen, which negatively impacts water cycles and reduces infiltration capacity and storage of the soil and increases runoff.
    When millions of acres of forest, especially rainforests, are cut down, we lose in many ways:
    â€¢Â Â We lose the ability to filter harmful levels of carbon dioxide out of the air.
    â€¢Â Â We lose millions of tons of vital oxygen released into the air we breathe.
    â€¢Â Â We lose because of the millions of tons of carbon dioxide that is released into the atmosphere by the burning of trees.
    â€¢Â Â We lose by changing the soil from its absorbing moisture and detoxifying oxygen to its being deforested, erosive and, on average, allowing for only eight years of grazing and growing crops for cattle before it has become depleted.
    â€¢Â Â We lose entire ecosystems of plants and animals—one mature rainforest tree can support three hundred to five hundred different types of plants and hundreds of