An Introduction to Tropical Rain Forests (I)

This will just be a brief introductory post to the book, which I gave two stars on goodreads – I have internet and the computer seems to not give me too much trouble right now, so I thought I should post something while I have the chance. The book was hard to rate, in a way. Some parts were highly informative and really quite nice. In other parts the author was ‘out of line’, and he goes completely overboard towards the end – the last couple of chapters contain a lot of political stuff. I have included below a couple of examples of some passages the inclusion of which I had issues with:

“It is also fair comment that human-induced extinction today is as great as any of the five previous extinction spasms life on earth has experienced.”

I have read about the human impact on species diversity before, e.g. in Wilson or van der Geer et al.. I have also read about those other extinction events he talks about. I mention this because if you have not read about both, it may be natural to not feel perfectly confident judging on the matter – but I have, and I do. My conclusion is that saying that the human-induced extinction occuring today is “as great as” the Permian extinction event in my mind makes you look really stupid. Either the author doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or he had stopped thinking when he wrote that, which is something that often happens when people get emotional and start going into tribal defence mode and making political points. Which is why I try to avoid political books. Here’s a funny combination of quotes:

i. “The failure of silviculture follows from working beyond the limits of the inherent dynamic capabilities of the forest ecosystem. This is commonly because rules drawn up by silviculturalists are not enforced, often because of political intervention. It may also be because economists, eager to enrich a nation, enforce their dismal pseudoscience to override basic logical principles and dictate the removal of a larger harvest than the forest can sustain without degradation.”

ii. “There have been attempts by campaigning groups in recent years to turn the clock back, sometimes claiming forests have a greater cash value for minor forest products than for timber.[324] A review of 24 studies found that the median annual value per hectare of sustainably produced, marketable non-timber forest products was $50 year⁻¹.[325] As a natural rain forest grows commercial timber at 1-2 m³ year⁻¹ ha⁻¹ or more, and this is worth over $100 m⁻³, sustainable production of timber is of greater value by a factor of at least two to four.”

The word ‘hypocrite’ sprang to mind when I read the second quote. Who does he think conducts such review studies – soil scientists? If economics is pseudo-science, as he himself indicated that he thought earlier in the book, then why should we trust those estimates? On a related note, should evolutionary biologists stop using game theory as well – where does he think core concepts in evolutionary biology like ESS come from? Good luck analyzing equilibrium dynamics of any kind without using tools also used in economics and/or developed by economists.

It actually seems to me to be a general problem in some fields of biology that lots of researchers have a problem separating politics and science – the social sciences really aren’t the only parts of academia where this kind of stuff is a problem. I have a strong preference for not encountering emotional/political arguments in academic publications, and so I tend to notice them when they’re there, whether or not I agree with them. There’s a lot of good stuff in this book and I’ll talk about this later here on the blog, but there’s a lot of problematic stuff as well, and I punish that kind of stuff hard regardless of where I find it. The quotes above are not unique but to me seem to illustrate the mindset reasonably well.

The book covers stuff also covered in Herrera et al., Wilson, and van der Geer et al., and concepts I knew about from McMenamin & McMenamin also popped up along the way. Herrera et al. of course contains entire chapters about stuff only covered in a paragraph or two in this book. The book deals with aspects of ecological dynamics as well through the coverage of the forest growth cycle and gap-phase dynamics as well as related stuff like nutrient cycles, but the coverage in here is much less technical than is Gurney and Nisbet’s coverage – this book is easy to read compared to their text. I mention these things because although I think the book was quite readable I have seen a lot of coverage of related stuff already at this point, so I may not be the best person to ask. My overall impression is however that people reading along here should not have great difficulties reading and understanding this book.