Reviews (1)

A Book that Has Not Aged Well
Most of the problem with this book is not the fault of the author but of the passage of time. While Earthly Goods was most likely right on target for 1994, when it was published, ten years later it is outdated but does not, unfortunately, read like a history. (Shaman Pharmaceuticals, for example, seems like a promising enterprise in this book. I thought I might check out their stock. They are bankrupt and have regrouped as Shaman Botanicals with only one product in their line, as far as I can tell. Stock is OTCBB at $0.002 as of today.)

Joyce's writing is dry and often times fairly technical leaving a layman reader like myself in the dark and, more importantly, skipping to the next paragraph. Readers with a specific interest in botany and pharmaceutical derivatives in plants may still find some of the information of value but it does not qualify as a good introduction for those without prior knowledge of the field.

Although I had high-hopes for this book, a revised edition where these stories are anthologized and recent findings and updates are discussed would have been much more useful. ... Read more

Book Description

Tropical communities are recognized as among the most species-rich and dynamic in the world.Yet, far from existing as dynamic equilibria, large unpredictable disruptive events dominate the longer-term dynamics set against the background of global change. This volume challenges the dynamic equilibrium idea further by arguing for thinking on a timescale of decades to centuries, finding new ways to handle unpredictability and uniqueness, and evaluating species diversity and community change at different scales. ... Read more

Book Description

This important overview of the special problems facing Southeast Asian rainforests contains essays by many of the world`s leading authorities on these tropical forests, including policy officials as well as scientists. The book emphasizes the need for immediate solutions in maintaining healthy populations of plant and animal species as well as in providing support for the local people. ... Read more

Book Description

The first edition of this book was published in the early 50s. The author moved to Manaus in 1951, when the cit y lived isolated from the world and was immersed in the Amazon Rain Forest…

When the author went there, the cycle of wealth brought about the rubber was almost over. Amazonia had not awoken yet to its greatness and to the international envy.

The careful reading of the fourth edition of this book will take the reader to the past and will bring him back to the present bearing towards the future. He will become aware that almost nothing has changed, except the dispute about Amazonia. We still have to discover the "green-paradise", where everything is transformed, where the resources are going to find solutions for countless problems that afflict mankind today…

In this edition the reader will find some of the more outstanding aspects of the view emphasized in boldface: this will provide him/her a comparison between the past and present.

These circumstances recommend the reading of this book.

In reviving the unfinished work, we added what our eyes see, photographs, framed in water colors, opening the windows to a unique world and recording the transformation imposed by Nature on the Amazon Rain Forest…

Start reading and you will make a pleasant journey to the Green World. ... Read more

Book Description

Save the rainforest-not a question but a statement of fact. What good environmentalist would ever dispute it? Bruce Braun does; he goes so far as to ask, what is the rainforest? Who defines it? He examines the various practices-social, discursive and political-through which Canada's West Coast forests have been given meaning and made the site of intense political and ideological struggle. Departing from other work on environmental politics that assume the "forest" is a constant, The Intemperate Rainforest traces the way West Coast landscapes have been viewed and controlled by explorers, foresters, environmentalists, artists, scientists, adventure travelers, and Native peoples.

In 1993, dramatic political protests over logging in Clayoquot Sound in British Columbia propelled Canada's temperate rainforests onto the global stage. Celebrities and rock bands joined protests that, with over eight hundred arrests, were some of the largest acts of civil disobedience in Canadian history. Moving between these events and the histories and practices that produced these forest spaces, Braun reveals a complex postcolonial landscape in which a conventional politics of wilderness preservation is found lacking.

Bringing environmental studies into conversation with poststructuralist theory and postcolonial studies leads to a dynamic understanding of the forest as a historically contingent, politically charged object. Braun demonstrates how constructions of the forest are inextricably entangled with culture, race, nation, class, and colonialism in ways that trouble conventional approaches to nature and politics. Often portrayed as pristine landscape, he shows the forest to be an intensely cultural space inseparable from the primitivist fantasies, scientific discourses, and indigenous knowledges that constitute it. Displacing the language of wilderness, Braun proposes understanding the forest as a hybrid object that cannot be assigned to either "nature" or "culture" and also cannot be understood apart from the relations of power that infuse it.

Bruce Braun is assistant professor of geography at the University of Minnesota. He is the coeditor of Re-making Reality: Nature at the Millennium (1998) and Social Nature: Theory, Practice, and Politics (2001). ... Read more

Book Description

This publication deals with the composition and structure of both natural and artificially established tropical forests. After a general introduction, the role of tropical forests in the production of timber is discussed.Attention is then given to the structure of natural tropical forests, especially in Congo, Gabon, Ghana and Laos.The structure of artificially established forests is dealt with in another chapter.At the end, information is given on the thinning of such forest stands in Tanzania. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

Good reference
If your writing a paper on rain forest desforestation this book give great details and also statistics. This book has approximetly 22 pages designated to graphs and statistics on the world's decreasing rainforests. It gives effects of the destruction of not only to animal and plant life but also to Indigenous people. ... Read more

Book Description

Plant-animal interactions have become a focus of ecological research, with the processes of herbivory being of special interest. This volume examines the interactions of leaf-cutting ants with the rainforest vegetation on Barro Colorado Islands in Central America. It is the synthesis of field research on multiple scales extending over a period of several years. This work can serve as a model study summarizing and extending knowledge about herbivorous insect-plant relationships, and the resulting consequences on structural and functional features of tropical ecosystems. The text is an invaluable reference for researchers and land managers working in the fields of plant-animal interactions, herbivory, community ecology and biodiversity. ... Read more