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W. APPLEQUIST Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis, MO, USA The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know. Plotkin, Mark J. Oxford University Press, New York, NY. 229 pp. (paperback). USD $16.95. ISBN 978-0-19066829-7. As the largest tract of tropical rainforest on Earth, Amazonia is as much myth and metaphor as it is geographical reality. Since the time of its encounter by Europeans in the early sixteenth century, legions of explorers and naturalists and missionaries have returned to their homelands with conflicting and culturally-constructed narratives about the Amazon’s lands and peoples. In recent decades, biological, physical, and social scientists have revealed many of the region’s mysteries as well as misconceptions. But transmitting these disparate findings to the public has proved challenging, particularly in this era of politicized science. Mark Plotkin’s new book, The Amazon: What Everyone Needs to Know, has gone a long way towards solving the problem. It is exactly what we needed, and just in time. As a widely-read ethnobotanist and life-long Amazonian researcher, Plotkin is one of the few people who could have written this comprehensive and eminently readable book. It is constructed as if the reader were having a serious conversation with the author; the reader poses a question, and the author answers it succinctly and with authority. Most of the 67 sections begin with “What”, or “Why”, or “How”, and the queries are addressed in four jargon-free pages or less. The book is divided into eight chapters, each exploring a different feature of the great South American ecosystem—geology and vegetation, hydrology, plants and animals, indigenous people—and concludes with three chapters that explore the region’s problems and prospects. Many of the topics Plotkin explores will be familiar to the readers of this journal, but others may not be. Some that were new to
me included “Is there a coral reef in the Amazon?”, “Are there hallucinogenic frogs in the Amazon rainforest?”, “Are shrunken heads fact or fiction?”, and curiously, “Did Harvard send an expedition to the Amazon to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution?” In the final chapter, “How can Amazonia be saved”, Plotkin argues that protecting large tracts of forest is a “sacrosanct component” of meaningful and long-term conservation. He also discusses the crucial role of indigenous people, whose traditional modes of subsistence serve as counterpoints to more destructive forms of export-based land use. His review of a number of other elements—extractive enterprise, ecotourism, modifications on the REDD+ forest conservation strategy, and others—gives us hope that the Amazon can indeed be saved. No text can cover every relevant topic, and this is no exception. I wish in particular that the author had revisited the “Amazon—Lungs of the World” narrative. Although the notion that Amazonian deforestation would somehow choke off the world’s oxygen supply was put to rest decades ago by Hilgard Sternberg (1986, unfortunately only in Portuguese), it still gets dragged out and
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