Review
"A fluent and highly intelligent book." --Joe Kane, Orion Magazine

Review
"[The Brazilian rain forest] is . . . marvelously described and movingly evoked . . . Campbell offers what feels like a lover's last, lingering look." --William Grimes

Book Description
The western Amazon is the last frontier, as wild a west as Earth has ever known. For thirty years David G. Campbell has been exploring this lush wilderness, which contains more species than ever existed anywhere at any time in the four-billion-year history of life on our planet. With great artistic flair, Campbell takes us with him as he travels to the town of Cruzeiro do Sul, 2,800 miles from the mouth of the Amazon. Here he collects three old friends: Arito, a caiman hunter turned paleontologist; Tarzan, a street urchin brought up in a bordello; and Pimentel, a master canoe pilot. They travel together even farther into the rainforest, set up camp, and survey every living woody plant in a land so rich that an area of less than fifty acres contains three times as many tree species as all of North America. Campbell knows the trees individually, has watched them grow from seedling to death. He also knows the people of the Amazon: the recently arrived colonists with their failing farms; the mixed-blood Caboclos, masters of hunting, fishing, and survival; and the refugee Native Americans. Campbell introduces us to two remarkable women, Dona Cabocla, a widow who raised six children on that lonely frontier, and Dona Ausira, A Nokini Native American who is the last speaker of her tribe's ages-old language. These people live in a land whose original inhabitants were wiped out by centuries of disease, slavery, and genocide, taking their traditions and languages with them -- a land of ghosts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
PROLOGUEThe OdysseyThis is a story from the edge of thehuman presence on our planet, the far western Amazon River Valley, where theforest envelops the horizon and the sky vaults in indifference to our smallways. It is a tale of men and women on a frontier so vast that they seemeclipsed by it. It is the story of theirsurvival and their despair— and sometimes theirtriumph. It is a record of scientists who seek understanding of the naturalworld and of Native Americans who are losing that world, as their age-oldculture—and their cosmos— disintegrates. For thirty years I have conductedecological studies in the Brazilian Amazon, in particular aroundthe remote headwaters of the Rio Juruá, in the state of Acre, near thePeruvian border. In the course of my journeys there, I have become friendswith—indeed, part of the extended family of—the pioneers along the riversand highways. A wanderer from another continent, I have shared theirlives and for a moment was captivated. I lived among four cultures: therecently arrived colonists from Brazil"s densely populated east who havesettled along the Transamazon Highway; the Caboclos, people of mixedheritage who are masters at making a living along the rivers in thisintractable land; the local NativeAmericans; and the university-trained scholars ofthe Western empirical scientific tradition. The colonists settle along themoth-eaten edge of the highway —the Transamazonica—growing manioc andcoffee and raising a few pigs and chickens in the sandy soils. Some bringthe inappropriate farming technologies of Brazil"s arid east tothe tropical rainforest; or, worse, some are city folk with no understanding offarming or the soil. The colonists inevitably fail; the forest succumbs toephemeral small fires; its fertility is transient. The Caboclos are fiercely defensive oftheir lonely environment. Of African, European, even MiddleEastern descent—the vestiges of past diasporas—they are mostly NativeAmerican. They all speak Portuguese now. Although most have losttheir native languages, they have not necessarily lost all their nativeskills. They know how to eke out aliving in the river and forest. Still, they arenot masters of their environment. They are seduced by the forces of commerce,especially by rubber-tapping and cattle-ranching. The Native Americans, who onceunderstood every nuance of this forest and had a name for every one ofits species, have become dislocated and confused, coveting Western ways butunable to grasp them. In a generation many will become Caboclosthemselves, but in the quantum jump from Native American to Caboclo theywill lose their traditions, their culture, and their very language. Each family along the rivers has itsown tale, often tragic, sometimes heroic. The best interests ofthe different groups are often in conflict in a land where there is nolaw, a land neglected by an indifferent government hundreds of miles away. As inthe North American West of more than a century and a half ago, conflictsin western Acre today are settled by gunfights and knives; feuds endure forgenerations.I came to the River for science—toexplore one of the great and enduring conundrums of nature: how can so manyspecies coexist in such a small patch of this earthly orb? My colleaguesand I try to decipher how ecosystems evolve and are maintained. Isuppose, in retrospect, that my particular discipline, botany, wasirrelevant. I could just as easily havebeen an entomologist or an ichthyologist. Inany case, this lonely terrain would have seduced me into returning again andagain. For me, what was important was to bear witness to this place thatis like no other, to be a player in the game of science, and to have a dalliancewith knowing—aware all the while that the paradigms of today will besupplanted by better ideas tomorrow. How privileged I was to experience thisplace at this moment in history. Had I made this journey 150years ago, the vistas and ways of life would have been the same, although mytale would have had more danger. As I do today, I would have reveled inthe dumbfounding diversity of life forms. Unlike today, however, then I could havedone little more than pose questions. One might imagine that it"s a simplegoal to understand the way things are assembled on this planet, therules of order. Yet the measurement of patterns of species abundance andrarity—and the slow realization that this diversity was generated not by abenign and constant environment but by disturbance and inconstancy—has been oneof the great intellectual quests of our time. How many species can evolvein a small space and be held there? What are those species? Can weever count them all, describe them? Are they all variations on a limitednumber of themes, or are they a richly diverse mélange? Why are there any rarespecies at all? Why haven"t the most successful species pushed aside theothers? The field work necessary to answerthese questions is laborious: every tree and shrub on each small plotmust be collected, identified, and mapped. The task is all the moredifficult because many of the species inthe area I study are new to science, or havebeen described only in an arcane monograph in a specialized library. Inow have data from a total of 18 hectares. A hectare is an area of only100 by 100 meters, and 18 hectares is just a mote in the vast Amazon Valley.But that small area seems a universe to me. Its diversity is stunning: morethan 20,000 individual trees belonging to about 2,000 species—three times as manytree species as there are in all of North America. And each tree is anecosystem unto itself, bearing fungi, lichens, mosses, ferns, aerophytes,orchids, lianas, reptiles, mammals, birds, spiders, scorpions, centipedes,millipedes, mites, and uncountable legions of insects. The number of insectspecies alone—especially of beetles—may exceed the combined total ofall the other species of plants and animals in the forest. From repeated observation and from thepatient teaching of the Native Americans and the Caboclos, Ihave learned to regard each tree on my study sites as an individual: I know itsindigenous name, the lore that surrounds it, the medicines that can bemade from it, its uses for food or fiber, and myriad other arcane items ofits natural history. I know its hitchhikers, the traplining bees thatare its pollinators, the bats that disperse its seeds, its parasites, and the lianasthat steal its light. I know how the sap smells and feels; how the ocelots haveraked its bark and scent-marked it with their urine. I know the generationsof pacas that live under its flying buttresses, the army ants that bivouacevery few years in its hollow trunk, the tinamou that forlornly flutes from itshighest bough. I"ve observed its seasons of poverty, when the land is unyieldingand sparse, and of productivity, when the red-footed tortoises andwhite-lipped peccaries eat its fruits.The story of each tree is a story of seasons of birthand death, a story as old as Earth herself. To walk through the forest for a day oreven a month is like taking a snapshot of a child and expecting toknow what she will look like as an adult or how she appeared as a baby. Andso I returned each year to my little patches of forest to learn the destiniesof the trees I had so meticulously measured five, ten, or twenty yearsbefore. Had they survived? How much had they grown? Were the diversity andspecies composition of the forest changing? These simple questions, sobasic to our understanding of pattern and process, had no obvious answers. Ilearned that a tropical forest cannot be measured in only three dimensions.Time—the inscrutable fourth dimension that we measure with clankingmechanical wheels or the vibrations of molecules—is the key tounderstanding how a tropical forest was wrought, how its diversity ismaintained, and what it will become. When I first visited the Amazon, the treesseemed to be immortal; by comparison my life seemed as transient as an ant"s.But I learned that the vast majority of the trees in my forest plots died asseeds or sproutlings, and a sapling was lucky to live to reproductive age. Sometrees were broken by tipsy neighbors or suffocated in the lethal shade of thelight-greedy canopy; then their minerals were recycled into newrecruits. Today these trees exist only as numbers in my data book. Only a fewsaplings had the good fortune to sprout in a light gap created by the death of aneighbor, allowing them to invest in a trunk and the woody infrastructurenecessary to lurch into the canopy, stake a claim, and win a place in the sun.These few will become the giants that spread their boughs and cast their seedsover all the others, and I"m sure they will stand long after I have vanished. The more I explore the rainforest, themore questions I have and the more ignorant I feel. This, ofcourse, is the signature of good science. True, I have identified and mapped everytree and shrub in some small nooks and corners of this vast forest. Iunderstand these microcosms. But my research is constrained by its smallscale, which doesn"t reveal the whole any more than a rain puddle isrepresentative of a summer pond full ofliving things.In 1974 I was a member of the first teamof botanists to collect plants along the brand-new road being constructedbetween Manaus and Porto Velho, part of the Transamazon Highway system. Theroad, intended as a sinew of commerce, was the portal for my entryinto the forest, into places that had been inaccessible until then. Thehighway ran straight through the forest, indifferent to rivers and terrain,across highland and floodplain. At firstBrazil"s military government kept the settlersand squatters at bay, and for a while the trees grew right to the edge of theroad. At the end of the day we would simply pull the Jeep over to the edge ofthe road and make camp. Our campsites were full of wildlife, becausethe new road crossed the territories and migratory pathways of the forestanimals. One night, near the Igarapé Mutum, we had to sleep in the Jeep,because a jaguar prowled our camp, coughing and scentmarking the Jeep andour boxes of supplies with urine. For weeks the Jeep and our clothessmelled like a cat"s litter pan. The purpose of our expedition was torecord the plant species in the area before the road brought infarms and cattle ranches. We collected plants from dawn until dusk and spentthe evenings by the campfire pressing and drying them. In the parlance ofbotanical collecting, this unglamorous work is known as hay-baling. Yet it washardly routine: about one percent of our collections were species new toscience. Since we collected between fifty and a hundred plants per day, wehad as many as seven new species each week. By contrast, the last newtree species in North America—and probably in Europe, too—were collectedand identi.ed more than a century ago. Our discoveries were as original asany during the heyday of Victorian biological exploration a century before.Earth is four and a half billion yearsold. She will survive another five billion years before the corona of her starexpands and envelops the inner, rocky planets. How is Earth doing in hermiddle age? Pretty well, I"d say. On other planets of the same age life has not yetevolved, let alone intelligent life. They are as sterile and inarticulate as cinders. Some places on my natal planet are morevoluptuous than others. The Amazon River and its forest are thelast continent-sized stretch of untrammeled wilderness on Earth and thegreatest expression of her biological diversity. The Amazon Valley,in fact, has more species than have ever existed anywhere at any time duringthe four-billion-year history of life on Earth. Yet just at this moment of peakbiotic eloquence, we know that inevitably most of it will be lost. Overthe next several decades Earth will lose hundreds of thousands—perhapsmillions—of species. Most of thisextinction will occur in the tropical forests andespecially in Amazonia. In the course of a generation or two, the Amazonrainforest will be destroyed both as a wilderness and as a functioningecosystem. It is an old story, stalenews by now. Yet the loss of this place, I"mconvinced, will be the most egregious event of a generation of atrocities. Much of the deforestation of Amazoniais being carried out by hopeful innocents. They—the heroes ofthis book—are pilgrims on a frontier as wild as any that humans have known.This is not a tale of villainy, like the chronicles written by the ambulancechasers after the assassination of Chico Mendes. Instead, it has all thetrappings of a classic tragedy: goodintentions gone awry, heroes who don"t know anyother way. The forest along the highway fromManaus to Porto Velho is gone now, having retreated over the horizonon either side of the road. The Igarapé Mutum has become a wasteland. After theroad crews departed, the squatters invaded, burning the forestand setting down hopeful little plots. Cattle ranchers, given massive taxincentives by the government, came too. Some of the plant species we collectedhave never been seen since, and it is unlikely that they ever will be seenagain. Our collections will be the only evidence that they existed. I am confident that my species has thevision and discipline to prevent this wholesale destruction.Perhaps this book will offer a few morsels of hope by showing that there arepeople, living far from the highway, who know how to survive in the forestwithout destroying it. But the forces that want to consume the forest areoverwhelming. During the next hundred years Earth"s human population may be toovoracious to allow much wilderness to survive. Even if we temper ourappetites, only a few scraps of wilderness, each as isolated as Central Park, willremain. We will have forever denied our descendants the chance of living anadventure like the one I describe in this book. I am no futurist, but I accept that theloss of the Amazonian forest will deplete the soils, create worldwidechanges in climate, and result in an extinction of species as great as thatat the end of the Cretaceous Era, sixty-five million years ago, when theindifferent heavens—a collision with an asteroid or comet and the subsequentdarkening of the sky with smoke and dust—caused about 50 percent of allspecies to disappear. Life on Earth, I"m sure, will eventually survive the humancatastrophe, too. Earth is a forgiving mother with a long memory. Yet after theCretaceous collision it took ten or fifteen million years for new players toevolve and replace those that were lost. And even then the new life formsconsisted of variations on a diminished number of themes; today there are noammonites, no dinosaurs. Human history is but a microsecond on Earth"stime scale; as far as we"re concerned, we are changing the worldforever. Perhaps every planet with intelligentlife must endure this tragic and irreversible adolescence, when herchildren run amok. After all, as we lose our biological heritage we acquirenew traditions. We are now developing a godlike knowledge of physics, fromsubatomic particles to quasars. Artificial intelligent life is just overthe horizon. We know how to enslave the DNA from just about any organism to workfor us in the simple and innocuous cells of bacteria. We aremaking new life at the same time we are destroying the old forms.My profession has made me a recorder ofevents that will change humanity and, for a while, the world. Should mydescendants in future centuries read these words, they may find them astrange tale indeed, of a time and a place whose life forms are mostly alien to them. These days I am drawn to Homer, whowrote of voyagers along the shores of the eastern Mediterraneanwhen the land was mantled in forest and prowled by lions, leopards, andwolves, when the sea was graced by the songs of sirens. Describing an island inthe Adriatic, Homer wrote:There is a wooded island that spreads,away from the harbor, . . . forested; wild goats beyond number breed there,for there is no coming and going of human kind to disturb them, nor are theyvisited by hunters, who in the forest suffer hardships as they haunt the peaksof the mountains, neither again is it held by herded flocks, nor farmers, butall its days, never plowed up and never planted, it goes without peopleand supports the bleating wild goats.Those vistas, beasts, and sounds seemimprobable today, when the Turks and Greeks eke out a living on a shavenand bruised terrain where only the spiny and sharp-scented herbs disdainedby sheep and goats have survived, and where the teratogenic sea yieldslumpy, toxic fish and three-limbed pelicans. The people of theMediterranean have forgotten the ancienttapestry of their land. Their sea runs empty andsilent. Today we know that Homer"s singingsirens were humpback whales, now extinct in the easternMediterranean. And we know that lions once ranged as far north as centralEurope (indeed, Europe had its own subspecies, distinct from those ofAfrica and Asia). By Homer"s time the lions had already been hunted toextinction; as enemies of the "herded flocks" of goats and sheep, they werethe first to succumb to the shepherd"s bow and lance. Yet Homer mentions lionssixty-two times in his poems; lacking the real creatures, the blindold poet subsumed them into myth, symbols of strength and courage. Will the Amazon be like the easternMediterranean someday? Will the people lose their way andforget the species they once knew? If read a century hence, will my odyssey seem asunlikely as Homer"s? Am I, like the blind old poet, writing a future myth? For sure, Amazonia has its improbablebeasts, its own myths. Homer would have delighted in thestories of six-meter-long anacondas, of angelim trees as tall as the Colossus ofRhodes, of the mythical mapinguarí, a beast with backward-facing feet (itmay prove to be a not-yet-described ground sloth). There are plenty of darkand improbable sights in Amazonia—monsters to outsiders, yet commonplaceneighbors to those who know the area. But as in Homer"s Greece, there isa dark inevitability here. All of this beauty—this refuge of theimagination—will end soon. In a fewyears this forest will succumb to flames, themediocrity of monocultures, nationalistic paranoia, and the grubby quest for gold(a tiresome obsession as old as the New World). My generation will be thelast to live in a species-rich world, in a time when most taxa remained to bediscovered. And my generation will watch that world end. Our own species isforging the next great earthly extinction, diminishing forever our onlyhomeland. Perhaps never before in Earth"s history (barringextraterrestrial impacts) have theevents of a few decades been so important. The changesbeing wrought in Amazonia will alter the trajectory of life on Earth.The decisions that we make now, at the cusp of two millennia, will havereverberations five hundred years from now, and five million years. At least the Greek words for lions andsirens lived on after the beasts went extinct. Indeed, the Greeklanguage became the template of Western tongues. The native Amazonians,though, are losing their cultures and languages at the same time they arelosing the biological diversity of their world. The Native Americans haveforgotten thousands of the words they once used to describe this forest. Ithas become a forest without cognizance. Species and the words for those speciesare going extinct. Both life and extinction have become anonymous. Wescientists are forced to decipher pattern and process in a place wheremost species remain undescribed and their functions unknown. Now we mustrename its parts, construct a new scaffolding of taxonomy. We are mappinga New World— using expired Greek and Latin words from another timeand another continent as our tools.I came to the River for science, but Istayed for the beauty. My memories of the species I found—each an invocationof sunlight and water and minerals—and of the play of light in the canopy,the night sounds, the aromas and textures of the forest, the time andspace shared with friends on the frontier make up a tapestry of experience so richthat now, years later and thousands of kilometers away, it imbuesmy papery life with dimension and perspective. I once wrote a book about Antarctica, aplace where form and light are distilled into a few simple,evocative phrases, where only a few species have managed to climb ashore andsurvive. Antarctica is parsimonious and therefore easy to characterize. It isbiological haiku. But how do I describe the inchoate green tapestry of theAmazon Valley, this apex of earthly diversity? Imagine: there are morespecies of lichens, liverworts, mosses, and algae growing on the upper surfaceof a single leaf of an Amazonian palm than there are on the entire continentof Antarctica. How do I reduce this voluptuous diversity to words? Where do I begin?Copyright © 2005 by David G. Campbell.Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The western Amazon is the last frontier, the wildest west the Earth has ever known. For thirty years David Campbell has been exploring this lush wilderness, where more species live than have ever existed anywhere else at any time in the four-billion-year history of life on our planet.

With great narrative flair, Campbell takes us with him as he travels twelve hundred miles up the Amazon, turns left up the Rio Jurúa, and continues for another twenty-eight days to the town of Cruzeiro do Sul. Here he collects three old friends: Tarzan, a Syrian vagabond brought up in a brothel; Arito, a caiman hunter turned paleontologist; and Pimentel, a master canoe pilot. They travel together even farther into the rain forest, set up camp, and survey every living plant in a land so rich that an area of less than fifty acres contains three times as many tree species as all of North America.

Campbell knows the trees individually, has watched them grow from seedling to death. He also knows the people of the Amazon: the recently arrived colonists with their failing farms; the mixed-blood Caboclos, masters of hunting, fishing, and survival; and the refugee Native Americans. These people live in a land whose original inhabitants were wiped out by centuries of disease, slavery, and genocide, taking their traditions and languages with them — a land of ghosts.

FROM THE CRITICS

William Grimes - The New York Times