The
Amazon Basin is the part of
South America drained by the
Amazon River and its tributaries. The basin is located mainly (54%) in
Brazil, but also stretches into
Peru and several other countries. The South American
rain forest of the Amazon is the largest in the world, covering about 8,235,430&_160;km
2 with dense tropical forest. For centuries, this has protected the area and the animals residing in it.
Not all of the plant and animal life in the Amazon Basin is known because of its huge unexplored areas. No one knows how many species of fish there are in the river. Plant growth is dense because rainfall and regrowth of leaves occur continually throughout each year.
The Amazon Basin includes a diversity of traditional inhabitants as well as biodiversity in both flora and fauna. These peoples have lived in the rain forest for thousands of years, and their lifestyles and cultures are well-adapted to this environment. Contrary to popular belief, their subsistence living methods do not significantly harm the environment. In the past few decades, the real threat to the Amazon Basin has been deforestation and cattle ranching by large multinational corporations. People who live here also consume an extremely small amount of energy generated by plants and primary producers. Their energy-use percentage in the world is nearly zero. This is potentially helpful to the environment.
The Amazon basin has been continuously inhabited for more than 12,000 years, since the first proven arrivals of people in South America. Those peoples, when found by European explorers in the 16th century, were scattered in hundreds of small tribes with no writing system except for the part ruled by the Inca Empire. Perhaps as many as 90% of the inhabitants died because of European diseases within the first hundred years of contact, many tribes perished even before direct contact with Europeans, as their germs traveled faster than explorers, infecting village after village.
