The greens have it
John Jolliffe
Green Inheritance Anthony Huxley (Collins/Harvill £9.95) In the Rainforest Catherine Caufield (Heinemann £10.95)
According to David Attenborough's inevitable foreword, this almost ex- cessively glossy and handsome book 'un- veils the beauty and wonder of the plant kingdom and shows just how intimately Our lives are bound up with it'. This claim is to a great extent justified, and the colour Photographs on almost every page should capture the imagination of anyone approaching the subject of plants for the first time. One of the most delightful of them shows a strange assortment of vast leaves for sale in a street market in Calcutta at sunrise.
Most of the text is elementary; did it really need an expert of the calibre of Anthony Huxley to summarise a great quantity of 0-level biology material in this way? The chapters have titles like 'Our °ally Bread', 'Green Medicine' and 'The Spice of Life', and the text, though no doubt irreproachably accurate, has a habit of wandering off in innumerable direc- tions, so that the reader is never taken very far in any of them. But perhaps that was not the intention.
The lovely pictures, on the other hand, often suffer from having flat, jarring cap- tions, such as 'the Perigord truffle, an unusual underground fungus, one of life's great gourmet delights'. Another states that 'Wine has been made since the earliest times, perhaps as long ago as 8,000 BC'; and again, perhaps not. And does anyone ?ver the age of five need to be told that Seaweeds manage to subsist on rocky tidal Coastlines, perhaps the most changeable environments in the world'? Again, 'The Giant Kelp is reputed to reach over 200 metres on occasion' — well, does it or doesn't it?
The text itself, however, apart from the restlessness already mentioned, is as good as one would expect, and the details often splendidly vivid. Not long after the Pil- grims had landed in North America in 1620, an early traveller described riding across the prairies where 'the strawberries grew so thick that their horses' fetlocks seemed covered in blood'. But it is sad to learn that Garrya Elliptica, the pleasing shrub which one was brought up to believe had provided the origin of a common Adam decorative design, in fact only first flowered in Britain 12 years after the death of the last of the Adam brothers.
The merits of this book are considerable, and its faults derive from the old trouble that too many cooks spoil the broth. In the acknowledgements, which are hidden away after the index where few will find them, the author admits that it 'has been very much a collective effort', and gratefully refers to the 'immense help provided by the editorial team', though he is too polite to mention the almost equal hindrance provided by the writers of the captions to the pictures. It is difficult to know what sort of reader the book is really intended for, apart from being a general advertise- ment for the World Wildlife Fund, but it would certainly make an excellent present for any school-child with an awakening interest in natural history, and given the many colour photographs, it is not at all expensive. In the Rainforest, on the other hand, is a very badly organised and drearily written affair. It reminds us for the umpteenth time that the world is using up its natural resources at an alarming rate and in a monstrously wasteful fashion, often des- tructive of human life as well as of dwind- ling raw materials. But since it is the umpteenth time, a far better constructed and livelier presentation would be needed to make it effective. Depressing statistics abound (though they are not intelligently appraised). There seems no reason to doubt the author's claim that in 1976 the tropical rain forests which circle the earth on either side of the equator were dis- appearing at the rate of 14 million acres a year out of an estimated total of 2,400 million; and by 1980 the US National Academy of Sciences reckoned the rate of destruction or ruination at 50 million acres a year, often in areas where land own- ership is confused or even completely undefined. And even though there are now three new wild life reserves, five ecological research stations and five national parks in Amazonia (where in 1979 there was only one), these really exist only on paper and none of them is effectively protected against human depredation.
The author begins with the Tucurui Dam Project, where Eletronorte, the state elec- tricity company of North Brazil, next year intends to flood an area of 800 square miles of virgin forest above a dam 12 miles long. The company's public relations attendant cheerfully told the author that the large town being built to house the workers on the site was the first step in the creation of 'a new nation, based on the common man'. Reading between the lines, it is not diffi- cult to see that this will turn out to be based on the common dollar in extremely large quantities. In the course of this enterprise,
many of the Parakanan Indians were kil- led, initially by the accidental introduction of influenza, to which they had no natural resistance. Later, the so-called Indian Pro- tection Service was disbanded, after being accused by the Attorney-General of Brazil of having deliberately introduced small- pox, measles and tuberculosis, as well as robbing and simply murdering those who they were sent to protect. The only good news is that an official of the parent company of Eletronorte told the author that `Tucurui has us scared to death'.
Other chapters deal disjointedly with wasteful treachery and crime in other parts of the world — Indonesia, New Guinea, Guatemala, the Philippines, Colombia. It is like trying to follow a governessy grass- hopper through a dense jungle, though `jungle' itself is a word of which the author primly disapproves. The book amounts to a series of disconnected (and unillustrated) articles, each containing a selection of badly assembled statistics of varying sig- nificance, narrated in the most wooden style imaginable. Swamp forests, we are told, are hard to cross, 'for the obvious reason that the ground is water-logged and often perilously unstable'. It is easy to pick out something which sounds ridiculous from almost every book, but there are dozens of sentences as bad as the above.
Of course, there are scraps of tantali- singly interesting information here and there, for example on euglossine bees and their very complicated system of pollinat- ing orchids. And Panama (`tiny Panama', actually) has as many plant species as the whole continent of Europe, but the reader is then asked to plough through 20 pages about how plants grow better in hot, damp places than in cold, dry ones. Later on, there is suddenly an enjoyable but random chapter on quinine, containing the satisfac- tory news that Cromwell died of malaria rather than dose himself with what was described as 'Jesuit's Powder', whereas 20 years later the more pliable Charles II had the sense to swallow it down and survived.
But it is the lack of any attempt to create a narrative structure (for which the pub- lishers are as much to blame as the author), combined with the dismal drone in which she intones her tale of woe, which makes the book so formidably difficult to read. Nobody who is not blinded by selfishness and greed would disagree with her main thesis, but she forfeits sympathy not only by her leaden style but also by her failure to make any attempt to suggest a practical compromise. Of course, wasteful destruc- tion of resources is monstrous, but what is needed is a positive programme to cope with the genuine material needs of growing populations starving in shanty towns and at the same time to replace forests, to refrain from leaving a desert where they are felled, and to avoid polluting rivers. I suspect that more of such programmes exist than the author lets on, but with very few excep- tions (such as the Quaker settlement at Monteverde in Costa Rica) her book is unconstructive to a degree.
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