How many rainforest tribes become extinct each year?
According to the Indians, a wise person walks the earth like a bird flying across the skies – leaving no marks. This is how they have lived for centuries in the forest without harming it. I am assuming you are talking of all the rainforests in the world – not just the Amazon jungle? There were an estimated ten million Indians living in the Amazonian Rainforest five centuries ago. Today there are less than 200,000. In Brazil alone, European colonists have destroyed more than 90 indigenous tribes since the 1900’s. With them have gone centuries of accumulated knowledge of the medicinal value of rainforest species. As their homelands continue to be destroyed by deforestation, rainforest peoples are also disappearing. Most medicine men and shamans remaining in the Rainforests today are 70 years old or more. Each time a rainforest medicine man dies, it is as if a library has burned down. When a medicine man dies without passing his arts on to the next generation, the tribe and the world lose
