Rainforest's cover 6% of the Earth's surface. The Amazon has about 2.5 million insect species, tens of thousands of plants and 2,000 birds and mammals that live in the Amazon Rainforest, which happens to provide twenty percent of the Earth's oxygen. The Amazon Rainforest is approximately 1.2 billion acres, and yet it is only 54% of the total Rain Forests left on Earth.The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the "Lungs of our Planet" because it provides the essential environmental world service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. Unfortunately human progress has been devastating the Amazon with more than twenty percent of it destroyed.