Deep Jungle

About this book

This book is an exploration of the most alien and feared habitat on earth. Starting with man's earliest recorded adventures, Fred Pearce adventures high into the canopy - home to two-thirds of all the creatures on our planet, many of them never coming down to earth. Even now, new species of animals are being discovered. And Pearce discovers secrets about how evolution works, the intricate links that connect us all, and maybe even clues to where humans came from.

The jungle holds the key to our future foods and medicines, our climate and to our understanding of how life works. At the start of a new millennium Pearce asks why we continue to waste precious time - and billions of dollars - looking for signs of life elsewhere in our universe when the greatest range of life-forms that have ever existed lies right here on our doorstep. Today environmentalists say we are on the verge of destroying the last rainforests, and with it the planet's evolutionary crucible, and maybe even its ability to maintain life on Earth. But nature has a way of getting its own back. The Mayans and the people of Angkor went too far in manipulating nature and paid the ultimate price. Their civilisations died and the jungle returned. Nature reclaimed it's own and it may do so again.

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Biography

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. He is a regular broadcaster on radio and TV, with interview credits from Today to Richard and Judy to the Open University.