Driving down Ninth Avenue, choking on diesel fumes from a truck just ahead of us, I say to my friend Billy (he is exactly two-thirds my age), “I wonder whether you will see the end of internal-combustion engines, the end of oil, a cleaner world.”
A cleaner world. The thought zooms me away from Ninth Avenue to a forest world—in particular, to the one described in “That Glorious Forest,” Sir Ghillean Prance’s book about his thirty-nine visits to the Amazon in the past fifty years. Prance, one of our greatest tropical botanists, is very much in the tradition of Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace and Richard Spruce, who charted the region in the eighteen-fifties. But Prance’s is not just a botanical eye: he sees what we are doing to the Amazon and its many peoples; he speaks for conservation, sanity, and reason, before we destroy it all.
I went to that glorious forest in 1996—eleven days of botany, study, and hiking, seeing hundreds of different species of trees in a single acre. I had planned, before I became ill, to go to Madagascar, to see its forests—and its unique fauna and other wildlife, especially the lemurs. I love lemurs. One has to see them, study them, to grasp the origin of our primate nature. Apes and monkeys do not take us far enough back. “Lower” primates like lemurs are our real grandparents, as T. H. Huxley might have said. (H. G. Wells, a pupil of Huxley’s, was well aware of this, but gave lemurs a tragic underground existence as the Morlocks in “The Time Machine,” feasting on the Eloi, the pitiful remnants of humanity still on the earth’s surface.) But most of the forests on Madagascar have already been obliterated, and, not unnaturally, the lemurs are dying.
Honking horns bring me back to Ninth Avenue. I seem to have spent hours lost in reverie, thinking about the Amazonian and Madagascan forests, lemurs, “The Time Machine,” but we have scarcely moved, are still behind the stinking, lung-destroying truck.
“Not in my life,” Billy answers.
Organikos 