Rainforests are key to the health of our world - they maintain the water and air cycles, store carbon, and have yielded countless numbers of medical drugs. We have already destroyed half their area. We need urgently to save the half that's left. This book explains why - and how. Rainforests are the lungs of our planet - regulators of the earth's temperature and weather. They are also home to 50 per cent of the world's animals and plants - which for centuries have been the source of many of our key medicines. And yet we've all heard of their systematic destruction; the razing of trees to make way for plantations of oil palms or cattle, the disenfranchisement of indigenous peoples, and the corruption that leads to illegal logging and pollution. But this is the full story you've never heard: an in depth, wide-ranging, first-hand narrative that not only looks at the state of the world's tropical rainforests today and the implications arising from their continuing decline, but also at what is being done, and can be done in future, to protect the forests and the 1.

6 billion people that depend upon them. It is inspirational, too, in its descriptions of the rainforest's remarkable birds and plants.and its indigenous people. Rainforest is a personal story, drawing on the author's many years' experience at the frontline of the fight to save the rainforests, explaining the science and history of the campaigns, and what it has felt like to be there, amid the conflicts and dilemmas.