Brazil/Amazon Rainforest & Jaguar Conservation

The Amazon rainforest is the largest store of magnificent biodiversity on the planet, yet huge acreage continues to be destroyed by humans every year, both illegally and legally, due to agriculture, mining, cattle ranching, burning, and logging for timber. The Amazon River and its tributaries, teeming with life, and the beautiful creatures who live in the coastal and forest areas around these waters, are also threatened by proposed hydroelectric dams. Each year an area of rainforest the size of the state of Massachusetts is destroyed, killing millions of beautiful animals, and annihilating an unspeakable amount of sheer life.

In addition to housing many of our planet’s most amazing forms of life (multi-colored parrots, monkeys, ocelots, jaguars, orchids, butterflies, reptiles, water lilies, exotic trees and plants, amphibians, sloths, fish, pink dolphins, etc.) the Amazon is invaluable to us all as a source of new medicinal drugs derived from plants and animals. Preserving the Amazon rainforest is also critical to the survival of many indigenous Indian peoples who are now threatened with extinction. When Indian tribes of the Amazon perish, centuries of undocumented medicinal knowledge, of the Amazon plants and creatures utilized by these peoples, dies with them.

The Amazon has also been called “The Earth’s Lungs” because of the huge, crucial amount of carbon dioxide this largest rainforest on Earth absorbs.

Incredibly, tropical rainforests are so fantastically rich with life, that although only 6% of the Earth’s surface is covered by rainforest, this 6% contains 50% of the world’s species. And, the Amazon rainforest — which spans Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Suriname, Peru, French Guiana, Bolivia, Guyana and Venezuela — remains the single largest area of rainforest in the world.  The Amazon contains over half of the world’s total rainforest.

The principal geographical areas of Amazon rainforest protection funded by MYTHIX in 2008 will be in Brazil, Colombia and Suriname. In addition to protecting the Amazon forest, her animals, her indigenous peoples, and her invaluable medicinal stores (in plants, trees and animals), creating a “jaguar corridor” through Mexico, Central America and South America, to ensure that jaguars survive as a viable species, is a MYTHIX priority.

Aerial View of Sediment Run-off Caused by Massive Amazon Deforestation. This entire area has been stripped bare of forest, so there are no longer any plants, bushes or tree roots to hold soil...which runs off into rivers and streams, killing marine life, even after the animals on land have been killed due to deforestation.

Aerial View of Amazon Deforestation