The Amazon is larger than life. It contains one fifth of the world's fresh water, sustaining the world's largest rainforest - over six million square kilometres - which in turn supports thousands upon thousands of animal and plant species, many of them still unknown. At the heart of the forest, the Amazon river is a staggering 6500km from source to mouth. But perhaps the most startling statistic is the extraordinary rate at which the forest has been destroyed over the past thirty years. In the state of Maranhão, over fifty percent of the forest had disappeared by 1989. Most of the remainder had gone by 1994, cleared largely by well-armed and well-organized loggers, hired guns, squatters and speculators