Tag: amazon

Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon is a vast region that spans eight rapidly developing countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana, an overseas territory of France.
The landscape contains:

  • One in ten known species on Earth
  • 1.4 billion acres of dense forests, half of the planet’s remaining tropical forests
  • 4,100 miles of winding rivers
  • 2.6 million square miles in the Amazon basin, about 40% of South America

There is a clear link between the health of the Amazon and the health of the planet. The rain forests, which contain 90-140 billion tons of carbon, help stabilize the local and global climate. Deforestation may release significant amounts of this carbon, which could have catastrophic consequences around the world.

The Amazon contains millions of species, most of them still undescribed, and some of the world’s most unusual wildlife. It is one of Earth’s last refuges for jaguars, harpy eagles, and pink river dolphins, and home to thousands of birds and butterflies. Tree-dwelling species include southern two-toed sloths, pygmy marmosets, saddleback and emperor tamarins, and Goeldi’s monkeys.

Macaw

The diversity of the region is staggering:

  • 40,000 plant species
  • 2,400 freshwater fish species
  • more than 370 types of reptiles
THREATS

Transportation and energy infrastructure are essential for national and regional development, but when they are poorly planned, negative impacts can exceed short-term benefits. For example, building new roads exposes previously inaccessible areas of forest to illegal and unsustainable logging. 

WWF works to promote best practices and decrease environmental damage from:

  • gold mining
  • oil exploration
  • illegal logging
  • overharvesting of fish and other aquatic species

There is high demand for the natural resources found in the Amazon, but weak law enforcement to safeguard them. In addition, inefficient extraction processes lead to the destruction of nature and wildlife. For example, some mining activities contribute to soil erosion and water contamination.

In recent times, warmer temperatures and less rainfall have produced droughts of historic proportions. The Amazon suffered its worst droughts of the last 100 years in 2005 and 2010. Long dry spells wither crops, decimate fisheries and lead to forest fires. This can result in significant shifts in the makeup of ecosystems and a loss of species. 

Jeff Bezos

Jeff Bezos ,(born January 12, 1964) Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S., entrepreneur who played a key role in the growth of e-commerce as the founder and chief executive officer of Amazon an online merchant of books and later of a wide variety of products. Under his guidance, Amazon became the largest retailer on the world wide Web and the model for Internet sales.

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1964. His mother, Jackie, was in her teens when he was born and she was only married to his biological father for about a year. She married Mike Bezos when Jeff was four years old. Mike was a Cuban who escaped to the United States when he was fifteen. He put himself through college in New Mexico and eventually became an engineer at Exxon.Jeff went to Princeton and studied electrical engineering and computer science. He graduated summa cum laude in 1986 with a GPA of 4.3 on a 4.0 scale.After he graduated from Princeton, Jeff joined a high-tech startup in New York called FITEL. After two years at FITEL, he joined Bankers Trust Company.

At Bankers Trust, he setup…show more content…He helped the company build the most technically advanced hedge funds on Wall Street. In 1994, Jeff read a statistic that said the Internet was growing at a rate of 2300% per year. He decided to leave D.E. Shaw and Company to form Amazon.com, which he named after the seemingly endless South American River.He and his wife, MacKenzie, drove to Seattle to be close to a book wholesaler called Ingram. Jeff, a programmer named Shel Kaphan, and a contractor named Paul Barton-Davis built the prototype for Amazon.com in Jeff’s garage in Seattle.

They spent a year developing database programs and creating the website.Jeff raised a million dollars to finance the company through twenty-two angel investors, whom consisted of family, friends, and former colleagues. On July 16, 1995, Amazon.com went live to the world and Jeff told the testers to spread the word that it was open. Within 30 days, the company had sold books to all fifty states and forty-five foreign counties. By September, the site had sales of $20,000 a week. Jeff has a unique management style. He invokes loyalty from his employees and most of them see him as a colleague. He has a distinctive, loud laugh that he uses to “charm and disarm” people. He is known as a fun person to work with, but his employees and investors know that he is serious about his company.

When Jeff Bezos first started his virtual venture, he wanted to call the company Cadabra, as in abracadabra. He phoned his Seattle lawyer to try out the name, but the attorney misheard Bezos and replied, “Cadaver! Why would you want to call your company that?” Bezos quickly reconsidered and adopted the name Amazon.com, after the world’s second-largest river.Despite Amazon’s stunning revenue numbers—the company’s gross profit in 2019 neared $115 billion—it hardly ever declares a major profit, as Bezos’ strategy has always been to reinvest profits into the company’s growth. But that doesn’t bother Jeff Bezos. “To be profitable [now] would be would be a bad decision,” he told PC Week. “This is a critical formative time if you believe in investing in the future.” By expanding the site’s offerings far beyond it’s initial book inventory, Bezos has turned Amazon into the largest online retailer in the world. “There are always three or four brands that matter,” Bezos told PC Week. “With the lead we have today, we should be the No. 1 player.”Amazon’s runaway growth has made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. By owning 12 percent of the company, Bezos’ net worth is estimated to be $116 billion. He maintains the world’s richest man status despite going through a divorce in with wife MacKenzie, who received 4% of Amazon in the settlement (valued at $38 billion). But you wouldn’t know how rich Bezos is from his pay stub. He has collected the same $81,840 salary from the company for over two decades.