Hayden, Tom
Tom Hayden is a native of California. He is an environmental and political activist.

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We are living through a period of the greatest ecocide, the greatest era of species extinction, since the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The Rolling Stone Environmental Reader, 1992.

At least fifty percent of all living things&emdash;some say more&emdash;exist in rain forests, the gardens of Eden where our amphibious ancestors perhaps first crawled upon land. There might be 30 million species, but we are only guessing because less than ten percent of such life, the genetic base of all we are, has been thoroughly identified. Ibid.

According to ((Tom) Lovejoy, we are destroying species before we discover them. Ibid.

. . . few realize that almost one out of four medicines in our pharmacies literally have roots in the rain forests. Ibid.

It's been estimated that there are at least 1,400 forest plants and insects with cancer-fighting potential. Ibid.

The world's rain forests are being destroyed by lumber companies, cattle ranchers and governments that dream of selling teak to Japan and hamburgers to America and Europe or paying off debts to the world's biggest banks. Ibid.

Here's a good question: Are we ultimately more dependent on rain forest resources than on Middle Eastern oil? Does anyone care? Ibid.