Patrick Roberts - Jungle: How Tropical Forests Shaped the World—and Us

B attling through the heart of the Brazilian Neotropics in July 2019, my student Victor Caetano Andrade and I fended off poisonous snakes, gigantic mosquitoes that can bite through the tough skin of crocodiles, and heat that made sweat cascade like waterfalls into our eyes. Over the previous ten years, my fieldwork in the worlds tropical forests had taken me from the leech-filled rainforests of Sri Lanka to the flammable dry forests of Australia and the volcano-skirted misty cloud forests of Mexico. But nothing had prepared me for the teeming life, stifling climate, and vast array of green that flanks the Amazon, the largest river in the world by volume. Just to reach our field site and host village required a 523-kilometer slow ferry (recreio) journey that took a staggering thirty-six hours, followed by another two-hour ride in a small, open boat, which we undertook while loaded down by several awkward boxes of scientific equipment, a rudimentary toolkit for on-site maintenance, and whatever clothes the remaining space and willpower would allow us to carry. Over the course of his summer research, Victor would suffer a bout of dengue fever, a pus-producing infected boil the size of a small plum on his hand, and the failure of an airplane engine during landing in a local city. This all likely sounds fairly familiar to those of you, particularly in Europe and North America, who have experienced jungles only in terms of the films and novels that are set there. From the trials of Apocalypto to Mowgli running with animals, most of us see tropical forests as a kind of terra incognita. They provide artistic metaphors and natural resources, but they are fundamentally different from our own ideas of home. In fact, the overwhelming implication of most Euro-American books, series, and blockbusters set in the jungle is that tropical forests are fundamentally incapable of sustainably and safely supporting large human societies.

This notion informs not just popular but also academic thought. Tropical forests are often ignored in discussions of our human story and the history of life on Earth. The dominant narrative of human evolution, for example, is that our hominin ancestors left behind the perils and slim pickings of the forest as soon as they were able, striding out onto open savannahs with novel tools ready to exploit the rich game opportunities that these environments provided. The search for the origins of our own species, Homo sapiens, and its rapid routes of dispersal around the globe has similarly focused on open grasslands or, alternatively, coastal settings. Likewise, discussions of the origins of agriculture or cities almost never involve tropical forests. We have deemed them unproductive and assume that they have uniformly poor soils, deadly natural hazards, elusive animals, and extreme climates that would make it impossible to maintain the types of agriculture and cities we associate with our own, purportedly complex human societies. Given the seemingly inevitable devastation inflicted by industrial farming and urban populations on these environments today, we wonder how these habitats could ever have supported sweeping monoculture croplands, vast pastures, and bustling metropoles. Instead, accounts of communities living in tropical forests tend to describe small, often supposedly isolated groups that rely on hunting and gathering to survive. These assumptions shape not only how we understand the history of tropical forests but also how we go about trying to protect them. Traditional conservation approaches to tropical forests assume that humans are simply incapable of living in them sustainably and that the best way of protecting them is to treat them as intact ecological wildernesses, with minimal human disturbance and presence. Even the word commonly used in English to refer to tropical forestsjungle, from the Hindi word