The beautiful Amazon Rain forest (Neil Palmer)

An American nonprofit environmental organization is leading the way for the largest tropical reforestation project in history.  Conservation International plans to restore 73 million trees in the Brazilian Amazon by 2023. The trees will sprout up in the Brazilian states devastated with deforestation. It will be the largest tropical reforestation in history spanning over 70,000 acres.

The Amazon at the brink (Sam Beebe)

Over the past 40 years, nearly 20% of the Amazon has been destroyed, and scientists worry that another 20% of the rain forest will be lost in the next couple of decades.”This is a breathtaking project,” said M. Sanjayan, CEO of Conservation International. “The fate of the Amazon depends on getting this right as do the region’s 25 million people, its countless species and the climate of our planet.”

Giant Waxy Monkey Frog (wiki commons)

The Amazon rain forest is home to the richest biodiversity of any ecosystem on the planet in recent years many new species have been discovers; yet the Amazon is rapidly vanishing with increasing global demand for resources. Rodrigo Medeiros, vice president of Conservation International’s Brazil office says, “Protecting the Amazon is not something we should think in the future we have to do it now.”

I am not one to get into the whole global warming controversy, but it’s pretty obvious that we need to keep earth as close to what it was when we found it for our children, grandchildren, and so on.  It is also pretty obvious that it is not the same, it is great to see people and companies with resources doing great things to help preserve our beautiful planet.