Abstract
One can easily become engrossed in the spectacular tropical photography of Patricia and Micheal Fogden in their latest book Portraits of the Rainforest. Larger-than-life colour portraits of wrestling frogs or a split-second shot of a golden viper in attack offers rare glimpses of the natural world. But Portraits of the Rainforest is more than just a pretty picture book. It is also a collection of entertaining and educational essays by biologist and award-winning author Adrian Forsyth.
For Adrian Forsyth, the complexity of the natural world has a beauty and symmetry akin to the artistic creation in a symphony or a cathedral. And just as people need some background in order to appreciate opera or certain art forms, they also need to know something about the world of nature in order to appreciate it. "When you walk out of one culture into another, it doesn't mean much because it's so foreign. The natural world is like that," Forsyth explains. "People need to learn how to appreciate it."
Although Adrian Forsyth has spent 20 years working in the rainforest and has observed the ravaging effects of agricultural, economic, and environmental policies on this eco-system, he does not write to convince readers to adopt a tree or to lament the devastation. His popular books and his regular column in Equinox magazine tell stories of life in the rainforest, in an anecdotal style which reflects his preference for natural history over science.
His anecdotes provide great stories for science teachers to get the attention of their students. They are stories, too, that students will remember to retell at the dinner table. The story "Jerry's Maggot" explains how a scientist befriends a maggot which has imbedded itself in his skull. Since this parasite is not harmful, costing him only a few milligrams of flesh and minor discomfort, he allows it to grow to the size of a goose egg. He comes to appreciate his situation as an opportunity to experience firsthand the ecological relationship between himself and another species. The equally gruesome story of Adrian's toe fleas (see end of article) is retold not only for its power to make skin crawl, but to illustrate in a non-clinical way the life cycle of one of the world's most maligned, yet necessary, organisms-parasites.
What is happening to the world's rainforests and to other ecosystems is not news, but it generates little action in relation to the scope of the problem as described by biologists and other experts. The problem generates little action because it does not affect the daily lives of politicians or the people who vote for them. And it does not affect people's daily lives because the effects of the changes are not immediately felt. Even changes evident in as short a span as ten years, less than a droplet in the ocean of historical time, do not register on the brains of humans, who seem programmed to respond only to immediate threat.