Book Review: Rainforest, Dispatches from Earth’s Most Vital Frontlines

Rainforest is a personal story, drawing on Tony’s many years’ experience at the frontline of the fight to save the rainforests, explaining the science and history of the campaigns, and what it has felt like to be there, amid the conflicts and dilemmas.

At the heart of this book you will find pictures of some of the jewels of the flora and fauna of the world’s rainforests (colour prints by Thomas Marent). Buy it for the pictures of the lichen katydid* from Costa Rica and the comet moth of Madagasca and the barred leaf frog of Bolivia. Buy it to learn how to save where they live.

Journalistic in style, there is a breadth and depth to the research in this book. It explains the science of the rainforests’ role in carbon storing, oxygen production and cloud formation and their vital role in the planet’s weather systems and rain cycles.

It tells us that the Jamaican red macaw now only exists as a 19^th Century watercolour by Rothschild; that the Amazonian Indians were enslaved during the rubber boom of the early 1900s; that the structure of the montane phantom butterfly’s wings “has inspired designs for more efficient solar panels” and much more.

We all ought to know what’s happening to the planet and this book helps to let us know about past campaigns and what hope there is for the future.

It tells you that bats make tents.

“Rainforest Dispatches” explains how there is a complex interdependence of plants, insects, birds and mammals in the rainforests of the world. The rainforests are crucial in protecting our planet’s climate and thus the human habitation of this place we call earth.

Buy it because the planet needs advocates.

(*a (typically) green long-horned grasshopper)

Rainforest, Dispatches from Earth’s Most Vital Frontlines by Tony Juniper is available from Profile Books by clicking here.