- Email: [email protected]
Australian Rainforests
TREE vol. 8, no. 4, April
sentence or two to totemism.) Their ancient India chapter on is satisfying, although it can never engage one’s imaginative excitement in the way that one of their mentors, D.D. Kosambi, does in his superb The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India’. What I found most successful - and a vindication of the ecological approach to human history - are the speculations in the chapter on ‘Caste and conservation’. They speculate that scattered tribes and fragments of former nations formed endogamous groups in the forest, each of which could only survive if it established for itself a specialized claim upon resources. This claim also gave to the group a ‘niche’ in the social organization, a niche which came to be respected by other groups. This ‘niche’ might be a claim on particular resources (such as certain game or fish) or certain trades or services (such as basket-makers or barbers). From this - and from Indian society’s remarkable tolerance of variety and its flexibility of incorporation - the authors deduce the origins and perpetuation of caste. This does not so much offer to displace other interpretations of caste, such as that of M.N. Sriniva$, as add to them an ecological dimension. One hopes that anthropologists will give these arguments sympathetic attention. In the later chapters we are in more familiar territory. The horrors,
7993
ever happens, we shall always have the British lion!’ Then, seeing the evident disappointment on my father’s face, he added, ‘Talk to Jawaharlal about it. He will see that something is done.’ And so it transpired; but that ‘something’ came from the modernizing, and not from the Gandhian, mind. It is a good and helpful book, then. But one lays it down in a state of depression. Is it absolutely necessary that so much ecological writing should be so deeply depressing? Maybe it is, and should be. Yet despite all exploitation and abuses, that vast area of fissured land, from the Himalaya to the tip of the peninsula, is so rich still in so many resources and species that one wonders if one might be permitted a glimmer of utopian encouragement. Might the downward drift not yet be turned around?
wastages and exploitations of successive human forest tenures are examined cogently and with care: the colonialist, the commercial exploiter, the industrialist, the pressing demand for railway timber, the demands of two world wars, and more. All this is done well and all is depressing in familiar ways. No-one is excused from criticism. The Indian national movement in the past 50 years is shown to have inherited colonial methods and mentalities towards nature, and to have added new needs for revenue of its own. Even the well-intended national parks and game reserves come under criticism, for ineffectiveness, insensitivity to the local populations (of humans), and a ‘modernizing’ cast of mind. This is no doubt true. In the years of struggle for independence, Congress had no clearly developed ecological agenda. For 20 and more years my father, Edward John Thompson, in books, letters and reviews, campaigned ceaselessly for the preservation of fauna and against the appalling slaughter of the shoots (of both large and small game) by British notabilities and military officers, sometimes emulated by Indian princes. In 1939 he was an invited guest at Wardha, where the Congress Working Committee was meeting. There he tried to interest Gandhi in the issue. Gandhi turned him aside playfully, ‘What-
References 1 Guha, R. (1989) The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Oxford University Press 2 Kosambi, D.D. (1970) The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India, Viking Publishing House 3 Srinivas, M.N. (1962) Caste in Modern India and other&says, Asia Publishing House
est remnants from logginglm5. Paul Adam’s Australian Rainforests is the first single-authored book to collate these recent findings and provides, in broad-brush strokes, a treatment of all types of Australian rainforest. The Australian rainforest is recognized as a unique assemblage of plant species that includes representatives of primitive angiosperm families. The rainforest community is often contiguous with sclerophyll vegetation that is, for the most part, adapted to dry climate and infertile soil. So stark is the physiognomic difference between rainforest and sclerophyll vegetation that diagnostic features of the former, such as epiphytes and lianes in the tropics and subtropics or ferns and mosses in the temperate zone, are considered unnecessary to the definition of Australian rainforest. It is broadscale floristic, physiognomic and structural features, together with the contrast between these and neigh-
boring sclerophyll vegetation, that make Australian rainforests different from all others. This is true despite the existence of dynamic situations where, for example, there are gymnosperms or sclerophyllous trees forming an overstorey. Adam adopts the Australian convention of spelling ‘rainforest’ as one word by following Baur’ (1968, not 1986 as given on p. vi), who argued that the use of ‘rainforest’ as a single word indicates ‘the community’s status as a fully independent plant formation’ and avoids ‘undue emphasis on rain as the sole determining environment factor’. In view of the distinctiveness of Australian rainforests this usage could perhaps be restricted to Australia. Adam also adopts the classification of Australian rainforest based on the life-time work of Len Webb’. Adam’s overview includes the monsoon forests of wet-dry tropics, tropical and subtropical rainforests,
E.P. Thompson Worcester, UK.
Rain Forests or Rainforests Australian
Rainforests
by Paul Adam, Clarendon Press, 1992. f65.00 hbk (xiii + 308 pages) ISBN 0 19 854223 2 Through the 197Os, the scientific and cultural attitudes of Australians changed dramatically from the pursuit of allochthonous values to an appreciation of things indigenous. Biologists, seeking origins of the Australian biota, shifted attention from patterns of similarity and recency to those of uniqueness and primacy. To many it was a surprise to learn that this dry continent was once covered with rainforest and that the ‘re-discovered’ tropical rainforests of today’s Australia had been nurtured in Gondwanaland. These revelations were embedded in a proposal to inscribe the wet in the tropics of north Queensland World Heritage List and, save 900 000 ha of tropical
150
thereby, rainfor-
TREE vol. 8, no. 4, April
1993
warm and cool temperate rainforests, islands. and closed forests on Boundaries and mixed forests, disturbance and regeneration, mangroves, and human impact, which all conservation present important are treated as separate issues, chapters. For many Australian readers, the accounts of conflicts between foresters and environmentalists, and between the Federal and State governments, will arouse vivid memories. Adam’s admitted bias is toward flora and a botanical perspective. There is much information on the origins and history of rainforest vegetation, but beyond one short chapter (20 pages) there is little mention of the rainforest fauna. This lack is partly because biogeographic and ecological information on animals is less available than comparable data on plants. But it is also because the book does not treat the rainforest community as a biological entity. Animal-plant interactions receive little attention; there is little information on pollination and seed dispersal, even less on herbivory and nutrient cycles, and almost nothing on chemical interactions. Nor are Australian rainforests examined as habitats for animals. The biological approach to understanding still remains uncharted by authors of rainforest books. For students it would be a useful companion to more fundamental textbooks on the subject. Unfortunately, at A$170 a copy - that is 55c a page, including references and some useful indexes - it will be out of reach to most. It is puzzling that at this price no colour plates are included and that diagrams are not of a high standard. Perhaps, if the out-of-
Mechanism, Natural Selection and Historicity Natural Selection: Domains, levels, and Challenges by George C. Williams, Oxford University Press (Oxford Series in Ecology and Evolution), 1992. $45.00 hbk, $24.95 pbk (x + 208 pages) ISBN 0 79 506932 3/O 19 506933 1 George Williams has written another book. He has been an influential figure in such diverse subjects as selection, senescence, group interpretation of Fisherian reproductive value, sex ratio and sexual
for example, regarded any emergence of mind from matter as ‘magic’, and was thus led to panpsychism3. Williams believes we should keep an open mind: ‘There could be no scientific finding more important than the demonstration of a mental principle, not itself physical, but capable of altering cause-effect relations in neural machinery.’ But he makes clear that he doesn’t expect any such important finding important if true, as runs a concise review of the Bible. Williams assumes that the three principles, and no others, apply wherever life Jiro Kikkawa has arisen. Other principles, including many very useful ones (e.g. Centrefor Conservation Biology, TheUniversity mendelism, DNA replication), are of Queensland, Brisbane,Queensland 4072, secondary and of limited scope. Australia Williams classifies himself as a reductionist, despite working with ‘jars and aquariums’. References Among the many topics that 1 Rainforest Conservation Society of Williams discusses are the gene as a Queensland (1986) Tropical Rainforests unit of selection, clade selection (he of North Queensland: Their Conservation likes this subject), levels of selection, Significance, Australian Heritage optimization strategies, historicity, Commission 2 Kitching, R., ed. (1988) The Ecology of and diversity within and between Australia’s Wet Tropics, The Ecological populations. This is more a collecSociety of Australia tion of Williams’ ideas on every sub3 Webb, L.J. and Kikkawa, J., eds (1990) ject under the evolutionary sun than Australian Tropical Rainforests: a systematic treatment. But the book The Science-Values-Meaning, is no less interesting for it. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial If there is a central theme, it is the Research Organization inadequacy of current knowledge. 4 Werren, G. and Kershaw, P., eds (1991) Although natural selection acting on The Rainforest Legacy: Australian National Rainforest Study (Vols 2 and 3), random variation is a sufficient Australian Heritage Commission explanation of evolution, Williams 5 Goudberg, N., Bonell, M. and believes we are far from having a Benzaken, D., eds (1991) Tropical complete, or even reasonably satisRainforest Research in Australia, Institute factory, knowledge of the details. In for Tropical Rainforest Studies an earlier book* he announced a cri6 Baur, G.N. (1968) The Ecological Basis sis: the prevalence of sexual reproForestry of Rainforest Management, duction in higher plants and aniCommission of New South Wales 7 Webb, L.J., Tracey, J.G. and Williams, mals is inconsistent with current W.T. (1984) Aust. J. Ecol. 9, 169-198 evolutionary theory. In this book, he expresses puzzlement over the remarkable constancy of mammalian and avian body temperatures, the electrolyte concentrations in sea vertebrates, the absence of vivipary in birds and turtles, the evolution of senescence, the inflexiLike its predereproduction. bility of sex determination, and cessors’**, this book is thoughtful, several others. The most difficult of provocative and pleasantly idiosynall, he says, is stasis; the various cratic. Unlike them, it deals with a examples of stasis ‘form the most variety of subjects rather than conserious set of difficulties facing centrating on a single theme. evolutionary theory today’. To me, The book begins with a ‘philowhat he calls a desperation hypothsophical position’ in which Williams esis - normalizing clade selection says that biological research has seems not at all desperate, nor does three principles: mechanism (as normalizing selection in general, in opposed to vitalism), natural selecview of nature’s love for mediocrity tion (trial and error, as opposed to a and the large genetic variance even rational plan), and historicity (recogin static species. But for me to say nition of historical contingency). that it doesn’t seem mysterious is Today’s vitalism is found in not to say we understand the mind-body dualism. Sewall Wright, details. place cartoon strips, silhouettes of some interesting exotic animals, but not essential black-and-white photographs and reproductions of advertisements had been dispensed with, space could have been saved and costs reduced. In its treatment of the unique Australian rainforest and in its accounts of botanical and human history, as well, of course, as the spelling of ‘rainforest’, this book is thoroughly Australian and establishes a new genre. That is to be applauded.
151
sentence or two to totemism.) Their ancient India chapter on is satisfying, although it can never engage one’s imaginative excitement in the way that one of their mentors, D.D. Kosambi, does in his superb The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India’. What I found most successful - and a vindication of the ecological approach to human history - are the speculations in the chapter on ‘Caste and conservation’. They speculate that scattered tribes and fragments of former nations formed endogamous groups in the forest, each of which could only survive if it established for itself a specialized claim upon resources. This claim also gave to the group a ‘niche’ in the social organization, a niche which came to be respected by other groups. This ‘niche’ might be a claim on particular resources (such as certain game or fish) or certain trades or services (such as basket-makers or barbers). From this - and from Indian society’s remarkable tolerance of variety and its flexibility of incorporation - the authors deduce the origins and perpetuation of caste. This does not so much offer to displace other interpretations of caste, such as that of M.N. Sriniva$, as add to them an ecological dimension. One hopes that anthropologists will give these arguments sympathetic attention. In the later chapters we are in more familiar territory. The horrors,
7993
ever happens, we shall always have the British lion!’ Then, seeing the evident disappointment on my father’s face, he added, ‘Talk to Jawaharlal about it. He will see that something is done.’ And so it transpired; but that ‘something’ came from the modernizing, and not from the Gandhian, mind. It is a good and helpful book, then. But one lays it down in a state of depression. Is it absolutely necessary that so much ecological writing should be so deeply depressing? Maybe it is, and should be. Yet despite all exploitation and abuses, that vast area of fissured land, from the Himalaya to the tip of the peninsula, is so rich still in so many resources and species that one wonders if one might be permitted a glimmer of utopian encouragement. Might the downward drift not yet be turned around?
wastages and exploitations of successive human forest tenures are examined cogently and with care: the colonialist, the commercial exploiter, the industrialist, the pressing demand for railway timber, the demands of two world wars, and more. All this is done well and all is depressing in familiar ways. No-one is excused from criticism. The Indian national movement in the past 50 years is shown to have inherited colonial methods and mentalities towards nature, and to have added new needs for revenue of its own. Even the well-intended national parks and game reserves come under criticism, for ineffectiveness, insensitivity to the local populations (of humans), and a ‘modernizing’ cast of mind. This is no doubt true. In the years of struggle for independence, Congress had no clearly developed ecological agenda. For 20 and more years my father, Edward John Thompson, in books, letters and reviews, campaigned ceaselessly for the preservation of fauna and against the appalling slaughter of the shoots (of both large and small game) by British notabilities and military officers, sometimes emulated by Indian princes. In 1939 he was an invited guest at Wardha, where the Congress Working Committee was meeting. There he tried to interest Gandhi in the issue. Gandhi turned him aside playfully, ‘What-
References 1 Guha, R. (1989) The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Oxford University Press 2 Kosambi, D.D. (1970) The Culture and Civilization of Ancient India, Viking Publishing House 3 Srinivas, M.N. (1962) Caste in Modern India and other&says, Asia Publishing House
est remnants from logginglm5. Paul Adam’s Australian Rainforests is the first single-authored book to collate these recent findings and provides, in broad-brush strokes, a treatment of all types of Australian rainforest. The Australian rainforest is recognized as a unique assemblage of plant species that includes representatives of primitive angiosperm families. The rainforest community is often contiguous with sclerophyll vegetation that is, for the most part, adapted to dry climate and infertile soil. So stark is the physiognomic difference between rainforest and sclerophyll vegetation that diagnostic features of the former, such as epiphytes and lianes in the tropics and subtropics or ferns and mosses in the temperate zone, are considered unnecessary to the definition of Australian rainforest. It is broadscale floristic, physiognomic and structural features, together with the contrast between these and neigh-
boring sclerophyll vegetation, that make Australian rainforests different from all others. This is true despite the existence of dynamic situations where, for example, there are gymnosperms or sclerophyllous trees forming an overstorey. Adam adopts the Australian convention of spelling ‘rainforest’ as one word by following Baur’ (1968, not 1986 as given on p. vi), who argued that the use of ‘rainforest’ as a single word indicates ‘the community’s status as a fully independent plant formation’ and avoids ‘undue emphasis on rain as the sole determining environment factor’. In view of the distinctiveness of Australian rainforests this usage could perhaps be restricted to Australia. Adam also adopts the classification of Australian rainforest based on the life-time work of Len Webb’. Adam’s overview includes the monsoon forests of wet-dry tropics, tropical and subtropical rainforests,
E.P. Thompson Worcester, UK.
Rain Forests or Rainforests Australian
Rainforests
by Paul Adam, Clarendon Press, 1992. f65.00 hbk (xiii + 308 pages) ISBN 0 19 854223 2 Through the 197Os, the scientific and cultural attitudes of Australians changed dramatically from the pursuit of allochthonous values to an appreciation of things indigenous. Biologists, seeking origins of the Australian biota, shifted attention from patterns of similarity and recency to those of uniqueness and primacy. To many it was a surprise to learn that this dry continent was once covered with rainforest and that the ‘re-discovered’ tropical rainforests of today’s Australia had been nurtured in Gondwanaland. These revelations were embedded in a proposal to inscribe the wet in the tropics of north Queensland World Heritage List and, save 900 000 ha of tropical
150
thereby, rainfor-
TREE vol. 8, no. 4, April
1993
warm and cool temperate rainforests, islands. and closed forests on Boundaries and mixed forests, disturbance and regeneration, mangroves, and human impact, which all conservation present important are treated as separate issues, chapters. For many Australian readers, the accounts of conflicts between foresters and environmentalists, and between the Federal and State governments, will arouse vivid memories. Adam’s admitted bias is toward flora and a botanical perspective. There is much information on the origins and history of rainforest vegetation, but beyond one short chapter (20 pages) there is little mention of the rainforest fauna. This lack is partly because biogeographic and ecological information on animals is less available than comparable data on plants. But it is also because the book does not treat the rainforest community as a biological entity. Animal-plant interactions receive little attention; there is little information on pollination and seed dispersal, even less on herbivory and nutrient cycles, and almost nothing on chemical interactions. Nor are Australian rainforests examined as habitats for animals. The biological approach to understanding still remains uncharted by authors of rainforest books. For students it would be a useful companion to more fundamental textbooks on the subject. Unfortunately, at A$170 a copy - that is 55c a page, including references and some useful indexes - it will be out of reach to most. It is puzzling that at this price no colour plates are included and that diagrams are not of a high standard. Perhaps, if the out-of-
Mechanism, Natural Selection and Historicity Natural Selection: Domains, levels, and Challenges by George C. Williams, Oxford University Press (Oxford Series in Ecology and Evolution), 1992. $45.00 hbk, $24.95 pbk (x + 208 pages) ISBN 0 79 506932 3/O 19 506933 1 George Williams has written another book. He has been an influential figure in such diverse subjects as selection, senescence, group interpretation of Fisherian reproductive value, sex ratio and sexual
for example, regarded any emergence of mind from matter as ‘magic’, and was thus led to panpsychism3. Williams believes we should keep an open mind: ‘There could be no scientific finding more important than the demonstration of a mental principle, not itself physical, but capable of altering cause-effect relations in neural machinery.’ But he makes clear that he doesn’t expect any such important finding important if true, as runs a concise review of the Bible. Williams assumes that the three principles, and no others, apply wherever life Jiro Kikkawa has arisen. Other principles, including many very useful ones (e.g. Centrefor Conservation Biology, TheUniversity mendelism, DNA replication), are of Queensland, Brisbane,Queensland 4072, secondary and of limited scope. Australia Williams classifies himself as a reductionist, despite working with ‘jars and aquariums’. References Among the many topics that 1 Rainforest Conservation Society of Williams discusses are the gene as a Queensland (1986) Tropical Rainforests unit of selection, clade selection (he of North Queensland: Their Conservation likes this subject), levels of selection, Significance, Australian Heritage optimization strategies, historicity, Commission 2 Kitching, R., ed. (1988) The Ecology of and diversity within and between Australia’s Wet Tropics, The Ecological populations. This is more a collecSociety of Australia tion of Williams’ ideas on every sub3 Webb, L.J. and Kikkawa, J., eds (1990) ject under the evolutionary sun than Australian Tropical Rainforests: a systematic treatment. But the book The Science-Values-Meaning, is no less interesting for it. Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial If there is a central theme, it is the Research Organization inadequacy of current knowledge. 4 Werren, G. and Kershaw, P., eds (1991) Although natural selection acting on The Rainforest Legacy: Australian National Rainforest Study (Vols 2 and 3), random variation is a sufficient Australian Heritage Commission explanation of evolution, Williams 5 Goudberg, N., Bonell, M. and believes we are far from having a Benzaken, D., eds (1991) Tropical complete, or even reasonably satisRainforest Research in Australia, Institute factory, knowledge of the details. In for Tropical Rainforest Studies an earlier book* he announced a cri6 Baur, G.N. (1968) The Ecological Basis sis: the prevalence of sexual reproForestry of Rainforest Management, duction in higher plants and aniCommission of New South Wales 7 Webb, L.J., Tracey, J.G. and Williams, mals is inconsistent with current W.T. (1984) Aust. J. Ecol. 9, 169-198 evolutionary theory. In this book, he expresses puzzlement over the remarkable constancy of mammalian and avian body temperatures, the electrolyte concentrations in sea vertebrates, the absence of vivipary in birds and turtles, the evolution of senescence, the inflexiLike its predereproduction. bility of sex determination, and cessors’**, this book is thoughtful, several others. The most difficult of provocative and pleasantly idiosynall, he says, is stasis; the various cratic. Unlike them, it deals with a examples of stasis ‘form the most variety of subjects rather than conserious set of difficulties facing centrating on a single theme. evolutionary theory today’. To me, The book begins with a ‘philowhat he calls a desperation hypothsophical position’ in which Williams esis - normalizing clade selection says that biological research has seems not at all desperate, nor does three principles: mechanism (as normalizing selection in general, in opposed to vitalism), natural selecview of nature’s love for mediocrity tion (trial and error, as opposed to a and the large genetic variance even rational plan), and historicity (recogin static species. But for me to say nition of historical contingency). that it doesn’t seem mysterious is Today’s vitalism is found in not to say we understand the mind-body dualism. Sewall Wright, details. place cartoon strips, silhouettes of some interesting exotic animals, but not essential black-and-white photographs and reproductions of advertisements had been dispensed with, space could have been saved and costs reduced. In its treatment of the unique Australian rainforest and in its accounts of botanical and human history, as well, of course, as the spelling of ‘rainforest’, this book is thoroughly Australian and establishes a new genre. That is to be applauded.
151