The Amazon basin is the largest tropical rain forest in the world made up of several geographical regions. The upland areas are known as shields and as high as a thousand meters and are separated by the main river to the east. These two shields are the Brazilian shields and the Guiana shields. The rest of the area is a sedimentary basin that is below a thousand meters and accounts for thirty-five percent of the basin’s drainage. Originally; over two million square miles of the basin were covered by dense tropical forest and for ages and still today its vastness and inaccessibility have offered protection to part of the forest. The world’s largest river in volumes of water is the Amazon. It forms a network that permeates almost half of southern America. It’s four thousand and eight miles long after the Nile in Africa. It has more than one thousand tributaries, of which seven of them are more than a thousand miles long and drains more than half of Brazil. The total drainage is over two million seven hundred and twenty-two thousand square miles which are about a third of South America. Species of fish are estimated to be over two thousand. It’s the home of arapaima fish which weighs around four hundred pounds and the anacondas and only a few of this region’s flora and fauna are known to science (Medina, p.24). There are few sizeable cities along river banks such as Iquitos; Peru which is scattered and Manaus in Brazil, but a large portion of the basin is unoccupied. Plantations have been cleared in the jungles over the past and the natives search for rubber and nuts. Ranching and Soya beans plantations have been occupied the most extensive non-forest use of land. In this case, trees are not cut down thus it’s a sustainable human impact on the forest. But in the last thirty years, the government has sponsored trans-Amazon highway building projects, colonization schemes, and industrial developments that have all transformed this region into polluted factory sites and with intense settlements. Chico Mendes is famous worldwide as an Amazon native known for defending the forest and its indigenous people in the Amazon basin which led to his death by people who were not pleased with his protectionism activities. Total forest cover loss grew from forty-one thousand and five hundred kilometers squared to five hundred and eighty-seven thousands kilometer squared from the year 1991 to 2000; most of the loss being attributed to cattle ranching with over ninety-one percent being used for cattle ranching in the 1970s’.Soya beans production by farmers has adopted transportation projects in the Amazon. There before, the construction of two highways led to deforestation and a settlement increase. The average annual deforestation is said to have risen by eighteen percent from 2000 to 2005, and it’s argued that in the next two decades, the annual deforestation would be at forty percent. This was according to the Guardian newspaper article “drought threatens Amazon” dated 12th December 2006. The Amazon has great economic importance. It’s said that one hectare of the Peruvian Amazon has a value of six thousand eight hundred and twenty dollars on fruits, timber, and also latex, and if cleared would be worth one thousand dollars