The Amazon Rainforest is a diverse ecosystem of products, just waiting for the human to discover and cultivate it. This forest provides humans with lumber and paper products, certain types of medicine, rubber, and much more. Without these products that humans produce, it is hard to imagine the world we would live in. Soy, a healthy alternative to both meat and dairy, is grown in some parts of the Amazon. Coffee beans, the heart of what the United States is so dependently addicted to, are indigenous to the climate and conditions of this certain rainforest. Gum, made out of the gum in trees, is also harvested from these very roots. People claim that production needs to stop here immediately when they are unknowingly using a product produced by the forest. Humans hold a dependency on the forest, one that they are attached to more than they are aware of, one that that would take years to ween off from.
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One product that people are not so aware about is the cattle ranching that occurs in the Amazon Rainforest. Areas of land are cleared in order for cattle to graze and grow. When they are full grown, they are sent to slaughterhouses to be killed and packaged for their meat. After this slightly gruesome process has taken place, the meat is sent off to billion-dollar fast food corporation, such as McDonald's and Burger King. These companies make millions of dollars a year off of advertising and just how quickly and semi-efficiently people get food from their stores. In fact, a New York Times article states that in 2011, "the average free-standing McDonald’s restaurant in the United States generated nearly $2.6 million in sales." According to the McDonald's official website, there are over 14 thousand locations in the United States alone. This fast food corporation decidedly benefits the world's economy as well as the United States'. None of this would be possible without the inclusion of the Amazon Rainforest.
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Now that countries as well as corporations are as dependent on the products and space that the Amazon Rainforest provides, it is evident that it will take millions of dollars to change our ways. Also, we would have to give up things such as make up, rainforest blend coffee, and general rubber products. Man's dependency on the rainforest is what has made commercial farming such a huge industry. If man keeps feeding an animal, the animal will grow and ask for more. This is true in the sense of commercial farming, showing that man has fed it money over the years, and now, man has become financially and physically reliant on the clearing of the forests in the Amazon.
