1.1 Tropical Rain Forests
At least a quarter of all pharmaceutical products are derived from tropical rain forests. An even more impressive statistic, when you consider that less than one percent of all Amazon plants have been intensively examined for their medicinal properties.
Amazing as it may seem, these forests occupy less than eight percent of the Earth’s entire land mass.
Tropical rain forests have provided us with treatments for leukemia, Hodgkin’s disease, breast, cervical, and testicular cancer as well as a wide array of analgesics, antibiotics, heart drugs, enzymes, hormones, diuretics, anti-parasite compounds, ulcer treatments, dentifrices, laxatives, dysentery treatments and anticoagulants. Vast quantities of rubber from the rain forests provide such everyday items as tires, gum, and running shoes. It is because of the amazing diversity of species that the rain forests are so important to humans.
1.3 North American Deserts
This symposium focused on how the biological significance of environmental impacts can be both evaluated by ecologists and described to decision-makers in the environmental impact assessment process.
Perhaps the two most difficult questions that biologists repeatedly face in assessing environmental impact are also the two most important:
