Jungle in JeopardyHighlight the qualities of the three boys in the lesson 'Jungle in Jeopardy'.
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Edward Hoagland is the author of ''African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan.'' AMAZON By Brian Kelly and Mark London. 382 pp. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $15.95.
By Edward Hoagland
IN a single decade of roaming
the Amazon 130 years ago,
the English explorer Henry
Bates identified 8,000 new species of insects, and scientists suggest it would be possible for an investigator to duplicate that feat even today. The Amazon is 4,000 miles long, with 2.5 million square miles of forests, about half the remaining forest land on earth. One-fifth of all the water that runs off the earth's surface is carried by the Amazon, and a fifth of the world's species of plants and animals live in its basin - probably half of them still ''undiscovered.''
Indeed, most of the known half aren't really known, only named, but because of pell-mell development pressures, most of the undiscovered species will have been destroyed before they've ever been examined by a scientist to see how they functioned and before ordinary people have ever seen their colors. The three or four million Indians of pre-Contact times have been reduced to 200,000, with scarcely a beginning made at recording the complexity of their adaptation, the flowering of human culture that was lost. By the 1930's Brazil had already become tristes tropiques to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and to a naturalist or anthropologist it is substantially sadder today.
Hell-for-leather, two young American journalists, Brian Kelly and Mark London, rushed about interviewing a good many of the right people to find out what is happening lately. They watched as two bulldozers dragging a chain between them leveled 25 acres of 100-foot trees in an hour - the new method of clearing in this complex region whose diversity (100 different species of trees are often found on one acre) discourages careful logging. Brazil's poverty makes quick development essential, yet paradoxically the soil is so thin that the pastures and grain fields created soon turn into desert.
Although the bare facts invite urgent elaboration, the authors found that not much in the way of elaboration was indisputable. The experts argued with each other not only about the effect of the forests' destruction upon the world's precipitation patterns and oxygen and carbon dioxide supply, but about the actual quantity of tree cover that is gone. I wouldn't have wished more travels and adventures upon them, but I do wish they had paused once in a while to describe 10 or 15 of the people they met memorably, instead of 100 or 150 in a blur. The premise of their effort was that four eyes were better than two. No doubt they did have more stamina than a lone operative could have mustered and coaxed more confidences out of a greater number of people, but a staccato quality, an inevitable incoherence, is the result. Nor did they take time to confide in the reader anything about themselves.
Brazil's officialdom seems to have been amused by this pair of green, though Portuguese-speaking, cubs (as they generally appeared to be). An Indian agency potentate simply guffawed as he sent them off to spend a few hours with the Parakana, a tribe that is dying out after its discovery only 13 years ago. He knew they hoped to unearth a scandal of an earlier sort - shootings, poisonings, smallpox-impregnated trade goods - that could be publicized and rectified, but also knew they were going to learn that hugging and ''loving'' newly contacted Indians kills them nearly as fast as murdering them.