WHEN Dona Cabola wants to know where to plant her crops, she watches the bees. She has the jeito, wisdom accumulated over generations 鈥� and is just one of the entrancing characters we meet on David Campbell鈥檚 expedition to record the plants in his Amazon study site.
Campbell, who is now professor of nations and the global environment at Grinnell College, Iowa, first documented Amazonian trees new to science some 30 years ago. Some have since disappeared forever. But he is well aware that the vanishing rainforest is 鈥渟tale news鈥�. A Land of Ghosts is not another woeful chronicle of destruction. Instead, Campbell invites us on a magical odyssey upriver to the western frontier wilderness of the Amazon rainforest.
Along the way he shows us the marvels and mysteries of a land where geography and climate have conspired to produce the Earth鈥檚 most splendid diversity of mutually dependent plants and animals. There are trees that exploit fish to disperse their seeds, rewarding them with nutritious fruits; and birds that protect their young from parasitic botfly larvae by nesting next to lethal wasps that feed on the flies 鈥� pest control in exchange for a meal.
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Campbell鈥檚 prose is poetic, and his painterly eye for detail makes you feel you are right there in the boat trying to avoid the wrath of a female caiman protecting her young. At night, he muses on the interconnectedness with faraway ecosystems that may have helped form, shape and conserve this isolated wilderness. Could the friagems, fierce wintry storms originating in the Antarctic, maintain forest clearings that nurture diversity? And is dry-season dust blown from western Africa and deposited during the rainy season responsible for increasing the fertility of the Amazonian soils?
It is the Native Americans inhabiting this inhospitable land that most elicit Campbell鈥檚 empathy. The Europeans brought slavery, genocide and disease, nearly destroying all the 98 tribes that once peopled this patch of Amazonia. Only 34 tribes survive, living with the ghosts of their neighbours.
The loss of these cultures, with their deep appreciation of the forest and their languages that described it, is truly catastrophic. Without the jeito these cultures embodied, and with pressure from increasing populations, Campbell is certain that the coming decades will see the death of the Amazon as a functioning ecosystem.
I hope his masterpiece of a book will help to show Earth鈥檚 鈥渕atricidal children鈥� the error of their ways.
A Land of Ghosts
Jonathan Cape
