When our children are adults there will be no more Siberian tigers, African elephants, or cheetahs left in the wild. The major sources of diversity and evolution on this planet, the tropical rain forests, are falling at the rate of 100 acres a minute. At the rate we are going today, there will be no wilderness left on the planet within 30 years. The only remnants will be tiny islands which we set aside as parks and reserves - but when you have an island of wilderness, extinction within that island goes on. We are the last generation that will have any decision to make about wilderness because within our lifetimes it's all going to be gone. Around the world the skin of life is being torn apart by the deadliest predator ever known in the history of life on earth. Brazil is typical of tropical countries where, deforestation is occurring at an accelerating rate. From the jungles of Central America to Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia, the world's forests are being cut, logged, and burned at an alarming rate. Scientists fear that such destruction will result in catastrophic damage to the entire planet. For one thing, a major part of the planet's genetic biological diversity is threatened. Three quarters of Brazil's 121 million people now live in urban areas, including hundreds of thousands who reside in squalid squatter settlements found in every major city. Giant metropolitan areas continue to prow, swollen by people in search of work. Brazil's largest metropolitan area, San Paolo, has an estimated 18 million residents; its second city, Rio de Janeiro, has 12 million. The Brazilian government simply lacks the money to deal effectively with the country's
massive problems of unemployment and urban poverty.