Deep Jungle - Hardcover

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Fred Pearce is a former news editor at New Scientist magazine, and is currently its environment and development consultant. He also writes regularly for the Independent and the Times Higher Education Supplement, the Boston Globe and Foreign Policy in the US and has written reports and extended journalism for WWF, the UN Environment Programme, the Red Cross, UNESCO, the World Bank and the UK Environment Agency. He is syndicated in Japan, Australia and elsewhere and has filed articles from more than 50 countries in the past decade. He was voted BEMA Environment Journalist of the Year in 2001 and has been short-listed for the same award in 2000, 2002 and 2003. He is a past recipient of the Peter Kent Conservation Book Award and the TES Junior Information Book Award. His books (for both adults and children) have been translated into eight languages. He is a regular broadcaster on radio and TV, with interview credits from Today to Richard and Judy to the Open University.

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The jungle stirs the imagination more than anywhere else on earth. Home to millions of life forms, graveyard to whole civilizations, it holds the promise of our greatest dreams but also our nightmares. Green heaven or green hell, we have explored just a fraction and been awed. May it always be so.

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It is the most extreme, the most complex place on earth - perhaps the universe. But is it a green heaven or green hell? Once, the jungle was imprenetrable, alien, a source of unimaginable horror: Today we call it rainforest, and understand it to be the crucible of evolution, the heart and lungs of our planet. And yet we are still plagued by jungle myths.

Fred Pearce begins his exploration of the jungle with the tentative steps of European pioneers in search of El Dorado. Millions died, no one found a city of gold, but the dream persisted into the twentieth century; meanwhile jungle bounty came in the form of medicinal plants, ivory and rubber...As the jungle proved its worth as a source of wealth, its beauty began to entrance explorers. And the more that was discovered, the less we found we knew.

The jungle is home to two-thirds of all creatures on our planet. Many live high in the forest canopy - an new frontier that until recently we didn't even know existed. At the start of twenty-first century new species - even new primates - are still being discovered. Fred Pearce follows the modern pioneers: scientists and film-makers using specially devised cameras and innovative filming techniques. he goes aloft with the 'spider man' of Borneo and the pilots of balloons that fly throught the canopy into a world with itss own soil, a cornucopia of plants, and animals that never come to ground. He zooms in on new micro-research, he considers how rainforests create their own climate, and he investigates the notion that rainforests are our planetary regulators.

There have been people in the jungle for centuries - whole civilizations have gardenened in the jungle, farmed it and disappeared. Today we are told we are on the verge of destroying the last rainforests. but nature has a way of getting its own back. If we push the jungle too far, will it make us pay a price?