ONE OF THE EARLIEST European accounts of the tropical is found in the famous letter, dated February 1493, of Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) describing his first voyage of 1492-93. This was published in Spanish in Barcelona in April 1493 by Pedro Posa, with a Latin version appearing a little later. His account helped to establish a number of European myths about the tropics that still flourish today.

Columbus offered an image of great fecundity and diversity, yet did not see 'vegetation' as such, but rather 'a great variety of trees stretching up to the stars'. Using a modern colloquialism, we might say he couldn't see the forest for the trees. Columbus described the islands of the Caribbean as intensely 'fertile' and 'distinguished by various qualities', the palm trees numerous and far excelling 'ours in height and beauty, just as all the other trees, herbs, and fruit do'. His focus was on individual plants and organisms, and on their extraordinary variety of forms and functions.

Columbus's letter was a classic example of what James Krasner has called (1992) 'a disordered and fragmented visual field'. The notion of tropical 'vegetation', which is a prerequisite for the idea of the 'tropical rain forest', today an emblematic icon of the 'environment in danger', had not yet been invented in the European mindset. Europeans would not, in fact, see the tropics 'organismically' (holistically) for another three centuries.

Columbus's 'fractured seeing' is exemplified in the sections of his 'Letter' dealing with Hispana (now Hispaniola) and the island of Juana. In these, he described the plants he encountered as 'different' or exotic -- and in this we might say he was adopting an 'orientalist' view of the exotic 'Other', in the sense espoused by Edward Said, whose Orientalism (1979) comprises a complex discourse on power, domination and hegemony with regard to the relationships between the West (Occident) and the Rest (Orient). Yet Columbus balanced this with careful analogies with the home country:

trees ... the leaves of which I believe are never shed, for I saw them as green and flourishing as they are usually in Spain in the month of May.

Indeed, until the late-nineteenth century, European observers of the tropics saw little but a riot of individuality, or alternatively a gloomy area of highly generalised 'forest'. However, one word, 'jungle', did enter the English language in the mid-eighteenth century. This word derived from Indian origins and would change its meaning radically in European hands to become an important 'organismic' construct.

A very early reference to 'jungle' appears in The Journals of Major James Rennell, first Surveyor General of India, written for the information of the Governors of Bengal during his surveys of the Ganges and Brahmaputra Rivers 1764-1767:

We find the depths of Water from 34 to 8 Cubits (in ye dry Season), the Banks being mostly covered with Jungle we have very troublesome work to survey them.

Rennell here seems to have been equating the word 'jungle' with some sort of scrubby riverside vegetation. As he approached the Sunderbans, the great coastal plain on the Bay of Bengal, he appeared to distinguish 'jungly' vegetation from what he called 'woody' vegetation, by which he most probably meant mangroves and mangrove swamps that are influenced by the inflow of saline water from the sea. He latex' observed that there are many 'Tygers' in the 'Jungle'. His use of the word, therefore, does not equate with 'forest' in a modern sense.

'Jungle' is derived from a Hindi and Marathi word, jangal, which, in turn, comes from a Sanskrit word (jangala) for 'dry', 'dryland', 'wilderness', or even 'desert'. The fundamental meaning is thus 'wasteland', or foret in the Norman French sense -- that is, 'uncultivated and unenclosed land'. The word first entered English parlance to mean any uncultivated area noted for its tumble of long grasses, underwood, and thick vegetation. It later became transformed, so that by the twentieth century it had largely lost its Anglo-Indian connotations and referred instead to high forest and to the wild wood proper. This remarkable lexical change was well caught by Guy Madoc, who joined the Federated Malay States (FMS) Police in 1930. When interviewed for radio, Madoc continued to employ the romantic, exotic, and orientalist 'myths' that so characterised the writing of Columbus:

When we got beyond the rubber estates and saw the wilderness of the jungle, that, I think, is really what got me -- that first impression of the jungle as a mysterious and impenetrable place.

Hundreds of miles of jungle over rolling mountains, exciting torrents coming down through the jungle, and when the torrents levelled out into smooth river, green padi-fields and little Malay kampongs, dotted around in the shade of fruit trees and coconut trees. It was all I had imagined of rural Malaya.

The transter of meaning from dry open scrub to high forest may well have been assisted by the colonial expansion of Britain from India to Southeast Asia and to the Far East, the Malay Archipelago being far more heavily forested than the Indian sub-continent. Moreover, where the margins of the forest there have been affected by Cutting and burning, they tend to exhibit an impenetrable mix of vegetation, with many climbers and lianas, very reminiscent of the original meaning of jangal. Most Europeans would have only seen such forest margins, so that the word would feel entirely appropriate, an amalgamation in the mind of 'jungle' and 'tangle'. Even today, 'jungle' conjures up a brightly-coloured Disney-like image, or Hollywood 'film set', of riotous climbers and creepers, with Tarzan and his chimp swinging from tree to tree. Hence also modern examples such as the trade mark 'Jungle Gym', for a climbing frame used by children.

By contrast, the undisturbed inner forest is dark, dull green, and remarkably empty. It is thus salutary to remember that the modern idea of impenetrable virgin 'jungle' was probably derived from forests that had been cut and burnt by humans. The resulting mass of vegetation later encouraged the formation of many analogous negative phrases, such as 'concrete jungle', a place of intense competition, or ruthless struggle for survival, and the 'blackboard jungle' for inner-city schools. In US slang, these connotations also gave rise, in the Depression, to the use of the word 'jungle' to mean a gathering place of the unemployed. 'Jungle' is not, and never has been (except in the most popular of meanings), equivalent to 'tropical rain forest'.

The idea of 'tropical rain forest' had to be created in the European mind before it could be seen on the ground. The term itself was invented in 1898, although the idea had been prefigured in the writings of the German naturalist and polymath, Alexander von Humboldt (17691859). As the historian David Arnold argues, Humboldt, through his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the Americas (1824-25), 'helped invent the tropics both as a field for systematic scientific enquiry and a realm of aesthetic appreciation'. However, it would take nearly a century before his 'Romantic belief in the fundamental unity of the natural world' (the Cosmos) and his ideas of 'organic richness' would give rise to the tropischer Regenwald, 'tropical rain forest', proper.

By the mid-nineteenth century, explorers, following Humboldt, were at last beginning to think in terms of 'forests', although the language employed remained remarkably simplistic and general. The engineer and naturalist, Thomas Belt (1832-78), for example, in The Naturalist in Nicaragua (1874), a work that Darwin called '... the best of all natural history journals which have ever been published', confined his descriptors to phrases such as 'great forest', 'black forest' and 'gloomy forest'. In South America, there were also the 'Atlantic forest' and the selva, a word derived from Portuguese and Spanish, but originally from the Latin, silva ('forest'). Yet Belt still had no precise 'scientific' linguistic entity to employ.

This gap was finally filled by pioneer plant geographer and ecologist Andreas Franz Wilhelm Schimper (1856-1901) in his founding work on synecology (the ecology of living organisms and the environment grouped together) entitled Planzengeographie auf physiologischer Grundlage (1898; translated into English in 1903 as Plant-Geography upon a Physiological Basis). Schimper at last gave a precise linguistic entity 'tropical rain forest' definition and content:

evergreen, hygrophilous [waterloving] in character, at least thirty metres high, rich in thick stemmed lianes and woody as well as herbaceous epiphytes.

Like Humboldt, Schimper was deeply imbued with both German romanticism and a Teutonic sense of the Wald (forest). He too saw the world organismically, and he sought to identify all the 'organic entities' that were adapted to the land and to the prevailing climate. To him, 'tropical rain forest' was such an organism, a named functioning biome or vegetation unit. And because it was Wald, to his mind it was one of the most significant. In similar fashion, in Politische Geographie (1897), the human geographer and natural scientist Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) regarded the political state as another type of organism attached to the land. Such holistic ideas would eventually lead to the development in 1935, by Sir Arthur George Tansley (1871-1955), of the concept of the 'ecosystem', to the holistic views of the South African statesman, soldier and botanist, Jan Smuts, and, much later, to more fanciful constructs, such as James E. Lovelock's 'Gaia hypothesis', in which the whole Earth is regarded as a living organism.

A linguistic analyst would describe Schimper as a 'segregationist', for whom communication pre-supposes signs and signs are the prerequisites of communication. In this approach 'tropical rain forest' does not exist as an unequivocally defined 'object', but from 1898 when Schimper's definition offered a linguistic sign, people could learn what such an entity might comprise, and 'see' this organismic construction in the landscape. By contrast Darwin -- and Columbus before him -- was, in linguistic terms, an 'integrationist', for whom signs are the direct product of observation. Put more simply, in 1898 there was a marked change from 'seeing' a riot of individuals to 'knowing' or learning an organismic entity.

Darwin was the quintessential observer, so much so that he was utterly befuddled by the 'brilliancy' (his word) of the tropical world. The geographer Luciana L. Martins, writing in the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (2000), captures this well when she says:

... what most puzzled Darwin was the profusion of associations that rushed into his mind. Rather than being concerned with limits and categorisation of species, Darwin sought evidence of relations and transformation. In contrast to Humboldt, Darwin's encounter with tropical landscapes offered few possibilities for quiet contemplation.

In essence Darwin, like Columbus, possessed Krasner's 'disordered and fragmented visual field', and did not see 'tropical rain forest', but rather a vast and perplexing diversity of nature. Despite, therefore, Darwin's synthesis of the revolutionary and integrating idea of 'evolution' in On the Origin of Species (1859), during the second voyage of the Beagle -- which he described as 'the most important event in my life' -- he still 'saw' the landscapes of the tropics in a manner that differed little from Columbus and those who had gone before him.

The organismic approach was not only a key to changing a 'fractured view' of the world; it was also an essential prerequisite for the development of both modern 'scientific' ecology and social environmentalism. Yet, when the word 'ecology' was coined in 1866 by the German zoologist and philosopher, Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), he gave it a distinctly 'autecological' definition: the focus was still clearly on the individual plant or animal. Haeckel thus retained the 'fractured vision' of Darwin, with whom he frequently corresponded. Ten years later Haeckel's definition of ecology had changed radically under the influence of Humboldt and of German Romanticism into a more organismic and synecological one, in which the totality of plants and animals at any given location is viewed as a whole in relationship both to their environment and to each other. The idea of 'vegetation units' was created which, in turn, would lead to the work of Schimper, to the concepts of tropischer Regenwald, ecosystem and the biosphere, and ultimately to Lovelock's 'Gaia'.

Interestingly, the organismic approach to ecology finds strong precursors in the writings of two key American pioneer environmentalists, Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) and George Perkins Marsh (1801-82). In their respective masterpieces, Walden (1854) and Man and Nature (1864), the idea of synecology had been sensed, if not yet named, and both writers, the one in Massachusetts, the other from Vermont, had been influenced by German philosophy through East Coast Transcendentalism. Some scholars have even claimed that Thoreau was the first to have employed the word ecology, although, on more careful study, this appears not to have been the case.

Schimper's 'tropical rain forest' thus was the first 'scientific' or 'ecological' diagnosis of the construction. Unfortunately, there are now hundreds of such 'scientific' constructions, all varying in complexity and coverage, and, in consequence, creating linguistic and taxonomic confusion. By the 1970s, the problem had become so severe that an umbrella term was invented by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, 'tropical moist forests' (TMFs). This construct embraces a whole range of Schimperian inventions, such as the seasonal 'monsoon forest' and 'savanna forest'. Inevitably, it caused yet more confusion, and most modern statistics of tropical deforestation tend to refer to this broad entity of TMF rather than to the older 'tropical rain forest', as defined much more narrowly by Schimper.

Many of the organismic notions now found in 'Green' literature such as Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Greenpeace pamphlets owe much of their mythical content to twentieth-century embellishments of the original Germanic idea of Wald. The first of these was a direct product of the organismic view itself, namely an attempt to provide 'vegetation units', and later 'ecosystems', with their own life stories. Between 1910 and 1940, two ecologists, the one American, Frederick E. Clements (18701945), and the other British, Sir Arthur George Tansley (1871-1955), expanded the organismic idea through their concept of 'ecological succession': that is the succession of forms through which vegetation must 'grow' to achieve its maximum, optimum, state of adulthood. In this theory, they developed the idea of 'the climax formation' which, in the words of Clements, represents '... the adult organism, of which all initial and medial stages are but stages of development'. 'Tropical rain forest' was seen as a classic example of such a climax, and this 'adult organism', or tropical optimum, was deemed to be in balance and harmony with its environment.

In the theory of succession, climate was all-powerful, especially for Clements. The climax formation of the 'tropical rain forest', for example, was seen as in balance with a long-prevailing humid tropical climate. It is amazing that, as late as 1936 and in the face of a welter of evidence concerning climatic instability, Clements could still write that:

tendency of all vegetation under the ruling [my italics] climate ... and ... climaxes are characterised by a high degree of stability when reckoned in thousands or even millions of years.

Thus, he presented 'tropical rain forest' as the primaeval, undisturbed, climatic climax and optimum of the tropical world, a veritable 'cathedral of the wild'. Of course, to disturb the ancient harmony of this last surviving Eden, this remnant of a 'Golden Age', was the ultimate human sin. For Clements, 'man [sic] alone can destroy the stability of the climax during the long period of control by its climate ...'. This had to some extent been foreshadowed by George Perkins Marsh in Man and Nature (1864), where he wrote: 'Man [sic] is everywhere a disturbing agent. Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords.' However, Marsh, unlike Clements, did not subscribe to the view that 'Nature' should, or could, be left alone, or that 'undisturbed wilderness' was all that mattered.

Thus, German Romanticism, and its organismic view of the world, could now focus on the process of criminalising human actions with regard to its very own environmental construct, its very own utopia. The modern 'tropical rain forest' of the Green movement was nearly complete, and its construction was reinforced in 1952 by the publication of Paul Richards's fundamental Schimperian and successional text, The Tropical Rain Forest: an Ecological Study, a book that remained a standard work until very recently. A much-delayed second edition was issued in 1996.

By 1960, the 'tropical rain forest' had at last been invented. It was, in Edward Said's terms, an orientalist exotic 'Other', a European myth with elements dating back to Columbus. It was also the home of profuse biodiversity, as described by Charles Darwin, and of Michel de Montaigne's 'cannibals' and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 'noble savage'. It was the linguistic sign of Schimper and, later, of Paul Richards. But above all, it was a German Romantic myth, with a deep emphasis on its role in achieving equilibrium, balance, and harmony; it was the optimum vegetation for its region of the Earth, primaeval and ancient, the last Eden, vulnerable only to the sullying greed and sinfulness of humankind. It was also Germanic and Massachusetts Wald; the hunting horns of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischutz could be heard blaring across the world. Moreover, such an ur-wald must be saved at all costs. In the words of the environmental historian Anna Bramwell, 'tropical rain forest,' like environmentalism itself, became the 'Northern White Empire's last burden and may be its last crusade.'

Today, the 'tropical rain forest' has grown into a hegemonic myth that sometimes can exclude all others from international debate. Yet there were, and are, many other ways of seeing and describing these 'tropical rain forests'. The French geographer Pierre Gourou, for example, presented a markedly different tropical entity in his magisterial survey, Les pays tropicaux (1947). David Arnold writes that, in Gourou, '... there is scarcely a trace of the Edenic: poverty and pathogenicity are all pervading. The tropical world is full of "horrors", a region where climate and disease are "terrible foes" to mankind.' Likewise Lucian Febvre, the founding geographer of the Annales School, denounced the Germanic creation of the 'tropics' as an 'over-idealistic geography', in which the soils were not fecund and in which virtually everything was inimical to humans. For him, the tropical rain forest was no wooded Eden; it 'was a desert, covered with verdure'. After all, both Europe and North America had developed and become rich precisely because they had cleared their forests, even in Germany, the very heart of the cult of the Wald itself, in England, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Ironically, these are untypical regions of the world in that their 'forest' is indeed a 'climax' of sorts, if only a recent one since the ice sheets had retreated from the land just 16,000 years ago.

It is intriguing to think how 'ecology' might have developed differently, if its roots had lain, not in the Wald of Germany, but in the open veld of southern Africa, or in the Mediterranean scrub of California, or in the deserts of Arabia, or, above all, in the seas and oceans, the dominant cover of the Earth. Forests are an exception in the world at large, and, even today, despite the human 'disturbance' so deprecated by Clements and Greenpeace, there are far more forests and trees than existed at the end of the last Ice Age, including in the tropics. It comes as a shock to many people to learn that most 'tropical rain forests' are less than 1.2,000 years old.

Yet, along with the giant panda and the whale, the 'tropical rain forest', Schimper's 1898 invention, has become an icon for all 'Green' movements, for environmentalists, for Deep Ecologists, and for New Age folk throughout Europe and North America. They are regarded as the ultimate organismic entity, 'the lungs of the world' (though this image is nonsense, lungs taking in oxygen and giving out carbon dioxide, the reverse of the action of photosynthesis!). To the older European myths have been added a whole gamut of such so-called 'scientific' myths to help to ensure that 'tropical rain forests' are seen as essential to us all, wherever we live and whatever we do.

But how acceptable is this Northern neo-colonial myth, which has been exported worldwide through both empire and education? How far does it mirror the reality of an ever-changing tropical world? How far is it dangerously constraining development in the poorer countries of the South? Superficially, it may seem a moral myth, and one widely embraced by the new 'citizen scientists' of the North; yet it is still a myth that helps the North to exercise power over the lands of the South. The myth is thus a fine example of the prevalence, persistence and perils of idees fixes in environmental history and debate.

In essence, 'tropical rain forests' do not exist as an object; like 'beauty' and 'liberty', they are in the eye of the beholder, where they are created, and recreated, to suit each new generation and age, each new power structure. In the near future, there will surely be 'virtual rain forests', far from anything envisioned by Columbus, Darwin, Schimper, or even Greenpeace. And with inexorable climate change, who knows how the 'real' world will look in a thousand years time?

FOR FURTHER READING

David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion. (Blackwell, 1996); D. Butting, Humboldt and the Cosmos (Sphere Books, 1973); Anna Bramwell, The Fading of the Greens (Yale UP, 1994); E. Cittadino, Nature as the Laboratory: Darwinian Plant Ecology in the German Empire, 1880-1900 (Cambridge UP, 1990); 'Constructing the Tropics', Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Special Issue, Volume 21(1), March 2000; James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Refraining Deforestation: Global Analysis and Local Realities (Routledge, 1998); James Krasner, The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative (Oxford UP, 1992); Philip Stott, Tropical Rain Forest: a Political Ecology of Hegemonic Mythmaking (Coronet Books, 1999); Philip Stott and Sian Sullivan (eds.), Political Ecology: Science, Myth and Power (Arnold and Oxford UP, 2000); Tim Whitmore, An Introduction to Tropical Rain Forests (Clarendon Press, 1990).

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By Philip Stott h

Philip Stott is Professor of Biogeography in the School of Oriental and African Studies