Ghillean T. Prance, 2022. The Amazon Forest and Its People in Black and White. Published by ‘Butterflies and Amazonia’. ISBN: 978-1-7398856-2-5. £20.  Marketed by Redfern Natural History Productions Limited, at https://www.redfernnaturalhistory.com/product/amazon-forest/

Before Prof. Prance became Director of The Royal Botanic Garden, Kew (1988-1999) he spent years in the Amazonian Basin tirelessly cataloguing the botany and describing new species to science, but that was when he was working for the New York Botanic Garden (1964-1988) and nipped off to the rainforest on 39 expeditions as one does. Few have ever had the extensive tropical field work that Prance has had, resulting in the discovery of 350 new species of plants especially with his exploration of the Serra Aracá plateau.

This book is all about then, but is a salutary lesson about now.  In this book you feel the warmth of the Amazonian people living sustainably off this watery world, whilst we in the West look in wonder and try to interpret how their way of life revolves around their natural habitats, flora and fauna.  In my experience the further you get away from civilisation the nicer and more helpful people are. This is reflected in the pages.

So this book looks at the nature of the living world that shapes the way of life of the Amazonian people, from their buildings made of wood and palm leaves, their ceramic clay pans, calabash cups, their baskets, red dye plants, natural fruits of the forest, ‘water vines’, plants to stun fish and plants used as contraceptives. No wonder the intrepid botanist Prance edited the more recent Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs (2018) – this is just one of the 29 books that he has written; Sir Ghillean’s knowledge is wide and wise and he has a genus Pranceacanthus named after him.  

Prance has trekked and waded through the Amazon rainforests where only a few famous people before him have ventured, including President Roosevelt and his son, as well as Victorian naturalists Henry Bates, Richard Spruce and Alfred Russel Wallace – probably more time in the forest than the Victorians.   Prance confirms to me that he has certainly spent more time in the Amazon rainforest than Wallace and Bates, and at least the same time as Spruce. The longest continuous period he was there was two and a half years in 1973-1976. 

Prof. Prance experienced the Amazonian rainforest as he says: ‘When I first went to the Amazon…..I saw many of the same things as the Victorian naturalists’. ‘There was comparatively little destruction of the forest’ then. The photographs in the book are backed up with quotations from many of these early explorers indicating how untroubled the habitats were from man.  Darwin had a short spell near Rio but never penetrated the Amazon.

Prance’s botanical skill and knowledge shines through with his descriptions of trees and vines and his identification of all the plants that the Amazonian people use for their life in the forest, and the ‘fruits of the forest’ that they depend on. This includes the ‘Siokoniamo’ fungus (Lentinus velutinus) which translates as the ‘hairy arse fungus’.

The chapter on the giant Victorian Water lily is delightful, as a species that can block a waterway with its magnificence (other lesser plants do too),  its structurally-sound leaves that man has copied in architecture,  and the way it captures beetles overnight for pollination purposes.  He introduces us to various Amazonian tribes, the Yanomami, Mayongong, Tikuna, Huitoro, the Jarawara, the Deni and the river people (the caboclo) who all visitors to the Amazon will meet.  This book records much of their social history with plants.

At school in England they never tell you that the water level of the Amazon rises and falls dramatically each year by several metres, which alters the nature of habitats; or that there are many of these caboclo people of African and European ancestry who live along these fertile waters who are not the tribes.  Of the native Indians there used to be over 2-6 million present (of over 350-400 tribes) before the Europeans arrived in the late 15^th century, and, as the cataloguer Greta Thunberg says, 90% of the Indigenous people were either massacred or died of infectious diseases, or 10% of the world population (see previous review of Thunberg’s latest book).   This is their assimilation with the forest.

Although the botany of the Amazon has not changed since it was photographed in black and white in the 1970-80s, there has been much destruction. Prance’s photo of rubber balls waiting for trading is almost a thing of the past, and the rubber industry that he describes had such a traumatic effect on the people, at the hands of the rubber barons who created the incongruous Opera House in Manaus.

Throughout the book and alongside photographs there are paragraphs from the Victorian explorers Bates, Spruce, Wallace and others and it is very telling that the population of Manaus in 1850 was just 3000 people.  Now it is a major hub for exploration of the Amazon with a population of over two million people. The book has a botanical slant for obvious reasons, but animals photographed in black and white are included. Feathers and furs are still used for adornment. Sadly society still collects wildlife and this reviewer’s first encounter with a wild jaguar was in a cage display in a hotel’s foyer, not in its natural habitat. 

Of the way that things have moved on, I liked the understatement that oil palm ‘as much planted by locals and also as an industrial crop that is destroying some rainforest areas especially in Amazonian Peru and tropical Asia’. Too true. You can fly for an hour or so along the Pacific Central American rainforest and see plantations of oil seed palm to the horizon that has replaced rainforest and all its biodiversity.

I am very glad that Sir Ghillean Prance still refers to ‘rainforest’ (it is all in the name), as opposed to David Attenborough who refers to it as ‘jungle’ (dry, spiny tropical forest). All books on the Amazon are a lesson to us all. The tropical habitat continues to be systematically destroyed. Prance is ever hopeful for a suitable outcome, for he says ‘It is not too late to help’ and he calls on Davi Kopenawa  from the Yanomami tribe who asks whether the white people know that when they kill ‘the spirits of the big earthworms (who) own the forest earth’, that the soil will instantly become arid.   

Overall, this is beautiful book that demonstrates the way that indigenous people are at peace with their environment.  There is a glossary, index and further information on charities that readers can help with rainforest conservation, and a list of publications of the early explorers cited. 

The Climate Book. 2022. Published by Allen Lane, and imprint of Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0-242-54747-2; 9 780241547472 £25 pp 446.

Any gardener will know that Thunberg brings to mind a bright orange flower of a climbing plant with a dark centre called a Black-eyed Susan, so my impression of this book is already coloured by Greta’s book, which is mostly blue not green for an ecologist.  Television viewers will have been prepped by Attenborough in ‘The Blue Planet’ where his ecological outlook is also blue, not green. 

The cover is clever is as it shows the average temperature of the earth from 1634 to 2020 going from blue (cold) to red (warming). You can download your own country cover from www.showyourstripes.com.

It is a heavyweight book, almost encyclopaedic, multi-authored and ‘created by’ Greta Thunberg. It is arranged in five sections: How the Climate Works, How our Planet is Changing, How it Affects us, What We’ve Done about it and What We Must Do Now.  Each section has an introductory section by Greta who sets the scene and crystallises the subject in her own inimical way, quite succinctly, stating the obvious cumulative facts (that people tend to gloss over) and in some cases, showing how ‘This is exactly how you create a catastrophe’ .

The publishers have gathered together about 90 scientists, professors, activists, students to write 500-1000 word pieces on familiar topics, and there are 13 topics on which Greta has had her introductory say.  These authors are all at universities, think tanks, action labs, climate labs, sustainability labs, carbon labs (sorry, being like Greta here, listing issues), all of whom are ‘on side’ with the travails of climate change. I don’t think their collective works will sort the world out, but their knowledge will help our understanding of what needs to be done. There is NOTHING by Attenborough, NOTHING by Lomberg to put statistics in perspective and NOTHING by Prince Charles as was.

As far as I can detect there are no articles in the book from any government agency around the world about how things are being sorted; none of the bodies that have been accused of ‘blah, blah, blah’ have had their say. So we know what is wrong, but we need another book on how to fix it.

Several of the authors are well known such a Elizabeth Kolbert, author of the ‘Sixth Extinction’, who writes a perfect resume of the effect of man on the environment through time. There are also vignettes of the parlous state of insects by Dave Goulson and Jason Hickell on his ‘Degrowth’ theory.

George Monbiot (who uniquely has a two slots in the book – seems Greta is a fan of Monbiot as she quotes him) has a chapter on the media as being the ‘most responsible for the destruction of life on earth’ (mindful that he writes for The Guardian!) rather than big industry. He also has a pop at BBC Channel 4 and Attenborough for not mentioning the fuel industry in his presenting of ‘The Truth about Climate Change’ programme. Monbiot’s other contribution (with Rebecca Wrigley) is on Rewilding, and he is on a popular (hopeful) winner when he says ‘We can replace our silent spring with a raucous summer’. 

Lord Stern (of The Stern Report (2006) has his precautionary, reserved  and caveated say by letting us know that ‘biodiversity loss, environmental degradation and climate change’ has been excluded from the economic considerations up until now. Thanks for telling us that, we kind of knew.  And that we are now on ’catch-up’ because ‘the economic analysis of climate change has failed on three levels’ first, not realising the true scale of the losses (hello – wildlife disappearing – the Anthopocene!!), second, not understanding the power of alternative energy, and third, ‘discriminating against future generations based on their date of birth’.  I think we all knew what he has to say.  

Such a collective book of words on the Climate Change has not been done before, and is probably all you need to know about the subject. To be sure it will be essential reading for all ecologists.  It can be dipped into to research a subject (but sometimes the 500 word résumés are too brief) and the book is let down by a poor index, that does not bring up major issues that are in the book (e.g. Acidification or Drax or Degrowth). It is better to pan through the contributors for interesting topics to investigate. Perhaps when the living world has collapsed it will be an excellent book explaining how it all went wrong.

JF’s Notes on Greta’s introductions to each subject

There is a recurring truth running through each section that Greta writes about, and that is about the Global North, where all the wealth is, and which prevails and seeks to direct the poorer Global South, she writes ‘the suffering of the many that have paid for the benefits of the few’.

Having read all the chapter sections written by Greta here is a rundown of her pronouncements- for, in her own words, everything is black and white. She is fond of compartmentalising and listing facts and figures, and I like that, so here goes. She is also well informed of her brief, and often quotes from book content.

• The richest 1% of the world’s pop are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the people who make up the poorest half of the humanity.
• There are 7.9 billion of us on Earth and we are in a sustainability crisis. As she reminds us in Sweden (her home country) ‘koka soppa pa en spik’ meaning ‘we have to make do with what we have’.
• On heat related deaths : 37% are caused by Climate Change, and roughly 10 million die from air pollution each year (Note to Greta’s Editor: this pops up at least twice).
• On rising sea levels -‘the snowball is in motion’  Scary information: At last Ice Age the sea levels rose by 120m as a result of a 5°C warming. There is enough ice on earth to raise sea levels by 65m….that keeping to 1.5°C will still release one third of the ice mass. 
• Every second an area the size of a football field of forest is cut down.
• We use around 100 million barrels of oil every day
• 8m tonnes of plastics are dumped in out oceans each year.
• On renewables she is horrified that burning timber is regarded as (eco-friendly) ‘renewables’ which she says has been adopted by governments as a loophole which allows emission calculations to exclude CO2 from timber-burning factors.
• On creative accounting: Drax Power station is the largest producer of CO2 in the UK, yet its burning of timber is not part of the emissions calculations. She visited Drax and was told that it receives four ship’s worth of pellet a week and seven trains a day of wood, not coal.
• She highlights this blind spot on renewables in the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which is the loophole used by governments.
• To exemplify her cause, she quotes the International Monetary Fund who says that governments subsidise the burning of coal, oil and fossil gas by the tune of $11m a minute.
• She has the latest 2021 formula for creating a catastrophe: loss of Amazon rainforest + the CAP now out of reach of the Paris Agreement + the US auctioning off 90m acre area of the Gulf of Mexico for oil exploration + China opening more coal power stations, and + the EU not updating climate targets = a catastrophe.
• After all of this she says ‘There is still time for us to avoid the worst outcomes.’

And her take on lifestyles:

• Veganism is a privilege mainly available to the affluent of the Global North

 The book is printed on certified FSC paper as you might expect. There are a few colour DPS spreads, some of which have been shown on BBC television recently, bubbling methane in the sea, collapsing permafrost, large thunderstorms…flooding, deserts, industrialisation.  References are hived off somewhere else at www.theclimatebook.org/. At the end of the book there are comprehensive lists of What needs to be done and What society can do and What an Individual can do.  As you might imagine, plant trees (not plantations), rewild nature, restore nature, make ecocide a crime, write new laws, rethink transportation, invest in wind and solar, face the emergency, educate ourselves.

We have been told that the beginning of the climate change started in the Bronze Age when China started using coal, so we have come a long way in the worlds destruction in a very short time. Time will tell if climate change will slow or stop. The world according to Greta is that it will do neither. This is a great book, a last milestone on the way to destruction.  Every school should have a copy. 

Lomborg, Bjorn. 2021. False Alarm: How Climate Change panic costs us trillions, hurts the Poor, and fails to fix the planet. Basic Books, Hachette Book Group. Originally  published in July 2020, also as ebook, and as a First Trade Paperback Edition in October 2021. 321pp.  ISBN 978-1-5416-4747-3 & 9 781541 647473.  $22.99.

This later edition has a long epilogue which, within the year of publication had to bring it up to date with the fast moving events following COVID-19. Lomborg’s earlier, controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist, Measuring the Real State of the World (CUP, 2001) went into ten reprints in one year.   Not that everyone likes to reminded of the facts and figures of climate change, but a different interpretation is always welcome. The stats speak for themselves but not everyone really puts them all together like Lomborg.  The author is not a climate change denier, far from it. He is a visiting Prof at Copenhagen Business School, a visiting fellow at Stanford and has been named as one of the 100 ‘Most Influential People of the World’. He knows his stuff and is authoritative with it because he is a statistician at heart; he was an Ass Prof of Statistics at The University of Aarhus in Denmark when he wrote the Skeptical Environmentalist. He deals in published data and incorporates the salient facts and conclusions into his work, so this book is full of supporting graphs and diagrams to illustrate his points – all of which are backed with references to published data.  You have to be committed to read all through his book as it is hugely scientific and not necessarily for the general public who would find it complicated.  The book was being finished off during the Covid epidemic but Lomborg quotes various papers that showed that the decline in the use of cars during lockdown did not have a significant effect on climate change. He states ‘Everything learned over the course of the COVID-19 epidemic has reconfirmed the basic message of this book. Just forcing us to do with less is not the solution, not in the rich world and certainly not for the world’s less well off.’, He is adamant that we need to solve five issues ‘to get our focus back’ which are i) increased carbon tax, ii) green innovation (the most important), iii) adaptation, iv) geoengineering, and v) prosperity.  He holds great store in President Biden’s promise of $75 billion a year for green R&D which could be ‘a real game changer.’  He analyses the truth about the EU’s stated bold commitment to reduce emissions by 55% (from 40%) in 2015. This shows he says ‘good intentions’ but the cost of $1.5-$5 trillion to achieve the actual tiny benefit of ‘postponing global warming by just two weeks’ by the end of the century shows it ‘is a blatantly bad idea.’ There are plenty of topics to investigate by delving into this book for instance on extreme weather events, where Lomborg compares the various extreme events in the US with the GDP, and finds that these events  are ‘causing less suffering in terms of deaths and in terms of GCP’.  With flooding and hurricane events Lomborg discusses the ‘Expanding Bull’s Eye Effect’ where, say an area’s housing expands by 58% over 20 years (actual example) a repeat of a similar flooding example will seem to be significantly greater, when the degree of flooding has perhaps stayed the same. The book is in five sections, The climate of fear, The truth about climate change, How not to fix climate change, How to fix climate change and Tackling Climate Change and All the World’s other challenges.  It is a good but necessarily scientific book with plenty of straight forward arguments informed by published data. Lomborg is a regular Tweeter so you can follow his day to day tweets on how he interprets the living world during the current energy crisis.  

Meadows by George Peterken. No. 2 in The British Wildlife Collection. 2013. Bloomsbury Wildlife. 431pp  ISBN 978-1-4720-60344  &  9 781472 960344  RRP £35.00  A review:

There are now 11 volumes in Bloomsbury’s Wildlife Collection and a fine series it is. This is an early one written by an authority on woodlands and flowers. Peterken worked originally for the Nature Conservancy (NC), and then he was part of the Chief Scientist’s team at the Nature Conservancy Council (NCC) that became English Nature (EN) and now Natural England (NE) – a fine pedigree to discuss the importance of meadows. This is a very pleasing and satisfactory book that is particularly comprehensive at well over 400 pages.  It feels like the author was given a free hand to include everything about meadows.  He starts out to define what exactly is a meadow and how other authors, including myself (Meadows, 1992) have included all possible interpretations of meadows.  Peterken states that meadows are technically ‘grasslands that are mown for hay, ‘which means they must be ‘shut-up’ in spring and allowed to grow without grazing until they are cut in summer’. Peterken tends to err on the importance of ‘grasslands’ in his interpretation of meadows, as this is where meadows tend to fall in the strict and official classification of British plant communities. However, there is no official classification directly for meadows per se.  The National Vegetation Classification (NVC) has acronyms for each type of grassland, and as Peterken says ‘the majority of meadows fall within MG5..’ but there is so much variation depending on the soil chemistry – limestone, clay etc.  Field botanists and ecologists will know what this means, and the names of the applicable wildflower species that designate each classification, but members of the general public will not. There is no glossary. There are over 50 references to NVC categories like MG5, but this reflects the serious side of grassland classification espoused by John Rodwell in his series of volumes, which Peterken follows. Meadows actually occur across several volumes as ‘meadows’ are actually only a description, or descriptive turn of phrase, about a collection of species describing one sort of habitat that we all subjectively like. Peterken could get bogged down in the minutiae of particular acronyms but he does not. There is however less room for the popular side of meadow creation in this book, which is now practiced widely privately and in public places. So, it was no surprise that the work of Dame Miriam Rothschild and her infectious enthusiasm and her influence on The Prince of Wales and his meadows is not mentioned.  Also the inspirational work of wildflower seed purveyor Donald MacIntyre and Emorsgate Seeds which has coloured many a motorway embankment and municipal parks across the country for all to see, for the last few decades is not mentioned.

 There are 15 chapters whose titles range from the meadow flora, classification, origins, making hay, diversity , ‘birds, bees, butterflies and other fauna’, ‘loss and survival’ and ‘looking forward.

The author comes out with the classic quote of 97% decline of meadows in England and Welsh lowlands up to the 1980s following the published work of Fuller in 1987. So this book celebrates meadows of which only 3% are left. He describes how they are so precious that many SSSIs have been created round them, and how increasing habitat destruction and  ‘improvement’ has led to their continued demise.  Thus, for the last few decades one has been dabbling in the conservation of just the 3% of remaining meadows and wondering how beautiful the countryside used to be. One also wonders if the 3% has been diminishing. No-one seems to be quantitatively charting any further demise. However Peterken does mention new agro-schemes for meadow enhancements across the countryside as well as many effective community initiatives, so all is not lost, and the quantum has remained the same, perhaps, or gone up? Re-wilding is mentioned around the scientific debate about what Neolithic meadows might have been like and the theories of Frans Vera (2000), but there is otherwise no mention of the present enthusiasm of re-wilding / wilding, and the often-mentioned Knepp Estate (West Sussex), where meadows are always part of any ecological or enhancement mosaic. 

The book is not entirely UK-centric, for the chapter on European meadows brings in discussion of meadows from Estonia, the species-rich alpine rich meadows of Ecrins National Park in France,  Switzerland, Moldovia, and Transylvania in Romania. We learn more about colourful wood-meadows, wet-meadows and litter-meadows, the variety of hay ricks, hay cocks and different ways of scything. Continental meadows are often extremely rich, arresting and beyond anything seen in Britain, but Peterken is sceptical….’that, contrary to the myth, not all Continental meadows are wonderfully floriferous.’ … ‘many are generally only grass-rich, with limited colour’. Some may disagree.

 One of the chapters in the book is about ‘Translocating meadows to the colonies’ and here Peterken describes the familiarity of visiting New Zealand with the British introduced grasses, wildflowers and bumblebees, or the progress of early settlers in east and west North America with their meadow endeavours. He deals with butterflies in meadows well, where he charts each species according to the various classification of meadow types. I am sure the butterflies appreciate being put into tidy boxes, but at the same time it does reflect their very important and pernickety food preferences reflecting their essential ecology.   Nearly all the well-known named meadows are mentioned, such as Cricklade, Lugg and Oxford meadows, and the range of colourful wildflower meadow plants that we all love and associate with meadows are in the book, even Lady’s Slipper orchid that few see in Britain. The book has a wealth of fine photographs of meadows and details of certain species of botanical associations. I like the old black and white photos of male-dominated hay-making teams, and the mixed teams, and of course pictures of haystacks always remind us that 97% of meadows are now gone. There are References and indexes to wildflower species and subjects – overall a fine treatise and unlikely to be surpassed.

 John Feltwell

Wilkinson, D.M., 2021. Ecology and Natural History. The New Naturalist Library. No. 143 in the series. 368pp. ISBN 978-0-00-829363-5  9 780008 293635.   Review.

142 titles of this esteemed series of New Naturalists Library (NNL) have never used the word ecology in the title, but it has been fundamental to the discussion of many. The book reminds me of a classic work, Ecology of the English Chalk (C. J. Smith, 1980. Academic Press, 573pp) which is much longer, and which Wilkinson does not mention; there is just one reference to chalk in the index which is surprising.  Prof. Wilkinson approaches his new book from a wide angle of interests in the living world, since he is a Reader in environmental sciences at Liverpool John Moores University, and visiting professor in ecology at University of Lincoln and honorary research fellow in archaeology at the University of Nottingham.  His published works range from bacteria to dinosaurs.  So how does he put together a book on ecology and natural history of the British Isles?  Possibly very selectively.  Indeed, this is the case, the author says that it written very much in the same manner as Prof Sam Berry in his Inheritance and Natural History (No. 61) i.e. as his final year lectures without the mathematics. Wilkinson’s book provides ‘something more accessible, while maintaining scientific rigour.’ First he describes what is ecology, so he starts the bar low. Some of his eleven chapters are on particular places such as Windermere, Peak District, Cairngorms, Wicken Fen, Snowdonia’s Cwm Idwal, Rothamsted and Wytham Woods (two chapters no less), and who would blame him, for some of these are classic sites where lots of students have worked and data for degrees have been gathered and much research material is available. There is also a chapter on Gilbert White’s swifts at Selborne,  Grime’s work on snails, but nothing on Berry’s work on small mammals or Kettlewell’s work on changing moth colours, and nothing on the flora of nunataks. Climate change figures throughout the chapters and discussions, and there are colour photographs of Bass Rock showing variable size of the gannetry.  There is a reproduction of one of Bewick’s prints in the period of the Little Ice Age of someone trudging through the snow. Change is an external factor that even Darwin acknowledged altered the ecology; then and now it still is the climate governing ecological impact. The author engages us with the way that algae and bacteria (one of the author’s favourite subjects) are part of the ecology of habitats, to this has to be considered in context of the botany of arctic-alpine habitats in Wales and Scotland, to the research plots of Wicken, where the ecology is influenced by man, to diminishing meadows. When Wilkinson is talking about invasive plant species I am reminded of Richard Mabey’s Weeds (1996, Profile Books. 324pp) which is a good in-depth read of the subject. As is customary with this NNL series of books, this volume has lots of colour photographs (generally good), references, and a general and species index. This is not a gloom and doom book (just the last chapter on man’s impact), it’s ecology to the core and a good read. It is pity that the word ‘ecology’ took so long to get its name on the front cover the New Naturalists series. At least ‘conservation’ had a head start on ‘ecology’.