A Voice Crying in the Rain Forest: Activist-Botanist Ghillean Prance Believes “God so Loved the World” Carries with It a Holy Obligation to Preserve What God Has Made

About 45 people, mostly silver-haired, have gathered in a dreary, old stone church hall west of London. On the floor beneath their metal folding chairs, lines mark the borders of a basketball court; but this congregation has come not for games but for a lecture and slide show on the Amazon rain forest.

Before them stands a dapper Scotsman wearing a double-breasted, navy jacket with a paisley handkerchief poking out of one pocket. His face is framed with sandy-and-gray hair, including a beard and moustache as luxuriant as tropical foliage. He is speaking in a soft, unemphatic voice. He has certain peculiarities in his manner: one eyelid hangs slightly lower than the other, and he speaks in spurts of words out of one side of his mouth. Professor Prance, he is called in England, and with his proper dress and scholarly demeanor, he looks every bit the part.

A slide of the forest canopy appears. “The Amazon is a tremendously exciting place for a scientist,” he says. “In Europe we may have three or four species of trees in a hectare [2½ acres]; in this part of the Amazon, I have counted 179 species per hectare.” Dissolve to a close-up of a tree trunk: “Note the beautiful flying-buttress design—much like you’ll find in a Gothic cathedral. Such design features support the trees in the very poor Amazon soil.”

Dissolve to a tiny yellow flower: “From this flower the Indians make a powerful antidote for snakebite.” A water hyacinth: “It originated in the Amazon, where natural predators keep it in balance. But when a missionary introduced the plant into the Congo, it went wild, choking out lakes and rivers. The same happened in the southern states of the U.S.” Then a macaw, a bird that looks as if an artist’s palette had been dumped on it: “Some species of these lovely tropical birds are going extinct, because of the demand by collectors. A few decades ago, Earth was losing about one species a day. Now that happens every hour.”

In his calm voice, Ghillean Prance is describing, quite simply, the future of the planet. Deforestation is a hot topic these days, and many experts point to Prance as the foremost authority on the Brazilian forest. He spent 25 years on staff at the New York Botanical Gardens, visiting Brazil often to do research. Now he holds perhaps the most coveted position in botany: director of the Royal Kew Gardens outside London.

Prance straddles two worlds. Most of the year he lives in the elegant director’s home on the grounds of Kew, overlooking a garden worthy of royalty. Two weeks ago Prince Charles dropped by to discuss the rain-forest problem. Next week the President of Colombia will visit. But every few months Prance sneaks away to his preferred location: perched on a research tower 140 feet high in the forest canopy near Manaus, Brazil.

Professor Prance, holder of three degrees from Oxford, projects one more slide on the screen. “And here is the source of much of my knowledge about the botany of the rain forest,” he says. From the screen stares a withered, old Amazon Indian, squatting, near-naked, peering at the camera lens with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. He belongs to the Yamamami Indians, a tribe once 20,000 strong, now reduced to 5,000. “These Indians live in a forest of enormous genetic diversity. We have studied scores of tribes in South America. The least efficient tribe utilizes 56 percent of all the trees for such products as medicine, clothing, food, and shelter. The most efficient uses every last species of tree. They’ve lived in harmony with the forest for centuries.”

Countries like Brazil, in their scramble for hard currency and economic growth, often fail to appreciate the near-frantic concern for tropical forests being shown in developed countries, most of whom have already destroyed their own forests. Appeals to aesthetic sensibilities (“Wouldn’t it be lovely to have a million-acre national park?”) and good neighborliness (“Your forests are the lungs of the world, so please don’t cut them.”) will not likely save the forests. Last year an area larger than the size of Great Britain fell to chain saws. Fifty acres a second are destroyed worldwide. But if someone could demonstrate that it was in a country’s best economic interests to save the forest, perhaps it would listen.

That is exactly what Ghillean Prance has done. While in New York he founded an institute with the oxymoronic name Economic Botany. In one detailed study, his associates determined that one hectare of tropical forest could yield a net value of $6,820 a year if managed correctly. Eleven species of fruit trees would produce annually, as would various nut and rubber trees. Cacao plants could be farmed in the shade of existing trees. Old timber could be selectively logged. In contrast, when the jungle is bulldozed and planted with a single crop, it yields $3,184. If cleared merely for cattle pasture, as in Brazil, it yields just $2,960. The facts are beyond dispute. If a forest is burned, ashes and residue will nourish crops for a year or so, but rains will soon wash that residue away, and the underlying soil cannot sustain those crops.

Unlike environmental activists who chain themselves to trees and hang cattle ranchers in effigy, Ghillean Prance addresses the forest crisis with computer charts and economic forecasts. His message is finally getting through, and governments are beginning to respond. Costa Rica, for example, lost one-third of all its forests over the course of four and one-half centuries—from the time of the Spanish conquistadors to 1960. It took only three decades to destroy the second third. But now the nation has set aside more than 10 percent of its total area as a protected parkland. Colombia turned over half its total area to the indigenous Indians, to use the forest in the way they know best.

Even in Brazil, Prance sees hope. “The government is not so much the problem as is private industry. Miners who use mercury to extract the gold let the mercury leach into creeks and streams, poisoning the water supply for local Indians. For a time, the cattle ranchers were killing one rubber worker a day because of their protests over the destruction of their rubber trees. But a new government in Brazil has appointed the country’s leading environmentalist as director of natural resources.”

Why is this distinguished scholar and world authority on botany spending his time speaking to a small church group in a dank Anglican hall? Because Ghillean Prance believes that ordinary citizens hold the key to averting the ecological catastrophe facing us. Moreover, he sees that task as part of his calling as a Christian.

Prance grew up on the Isle of Skye, off the coast of Scotland, a wild land of bogs, moors, and meadows. When his father died, a kindly neighbor took seven-year-old Ian under his wing, introducing him to the hobby of bird watching. In school, when most classmates were running around a soccer field or studying in the dorms, Ian was tramping across the fields, training his binoculars on birds and collecting and drying specimens of wildflowers.

At Oxford, Ian’s interests narrowed from the natural sciences to botany, and kept narrowing until, for his doctoral dissertation, he decided on a single species from a tropical forest. The result, “Taxonomic Study of Chrysobalanceae,” helped establish his reputation as a plant taxonomist (one who classifies organisms).

It was at Oxford, too, that his faith moved beyond the rigid formalism of his Anglican parents. “I remember as a six-year-old disgracing my parents by picking flowers on the way to church. They locked me in my room without lunch. Fortunately, the experience didn’t put me off botany or church.” In his first term at Oxford, he was invited to an Inter-Varsity tea, came under the influence of C. S. Lewis, and joined the Christian Union.

Ever since, Prance has striven to integrate the fields of natural science and theology. On his bookshelves, books by Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Lewis vie for space with titles such as The Owls of North America. Prance talks as if he believes the Creator takes the environmental abuse of our planet as a personal insult. “Environmental theology begins with Genesis 1 and 2, which shows God acknowledging the simple beauty of trees as ‘pleasant to the sight and good for food.’ Throughout the Old Testament regulations, I see a combination of concerns for the land: we should use it and till it, but also preserve it.”

Job, Psalms, the Prophets, Jesus’ parables—Ian Prance cites scores of passages that underscore our holy obligation to honor and preserve what God has made. As a botanist, he likes to quote Isaiah 41:19–20: “I will put in the wilderness the cedar, the acacia, the myrtle, and the olive … that men may see and know … that the hand of the Lord has done this, the Holy One of Israel has created it.”

“Even the most familiar verse,” he says, “ ‘God so loved the world …,’ contains an implicit environmental message. The word for world is the same one from which we get our word cosmos; it was for the cosmos, not just individual souls, that Christ came and died. Paul expounds on that theme with his talk of a groaning creation in Romans 8.”

He points out the church’s checkered past on matters of ecology: “Although such notables as Francis of Assisi, William Carey, and John Muir led the way in revering God’s creation, not all Christians have followed. It seems to me that one of the worst examples of arrogance is that of missionaries who assume they know better about such things than Indians who have lived in an ecological balance with their environment for centuries. By the very nature of their work in rural areas, many missionaries have unique opportunities to help with ‘earthkeeping’ at a time when the fate of the tropical-forest regions of the world is a vital issue.”

For many years Prance felt like a prophet in the wilderness. But he is now buoyed by the receptivity he gets in church forums, and by the emergence of several Christian groups concerned with ecological issues. By personality and inclination, Prance would shun the role of prophet altogether. A classically trained taxonomist, he would prefer to molder in a research lab all day, studying leaf patterns under a microscope. Yet he feels he has little choice but to carry on his multifaceted role as spokesman to the church, business consultant to tropical countries, and research chief of a renowned botanical institution.

The church meeting is drawing to a close. Professor Prance has gone well beyond his allotted time fielding questions from the audience. “Two more questions,” he says.

One person asks the inescapable: “What can we as private citizens do?” Prance details the steps he has instituted at Kew Gardens: dual waste baskets for recycling, organic farming methods, energy conservation. His staff buys furniture made from trees farmed in sustainable groves. He encourages everyone to eat Brazil nuts, an ideal way to make alternative ways of farming forests economically viable. And, of course, there are the political options of rewarding Third World environmentalism with debt forgiveness.

A proper English lady, of the type whose world extends to London and perhaps Suffolk but no farther, asks the final question in a quavering voice, “Professor Prance, what is it like to walk in a tropical rain forest?”

He pauses for a moment, eyes closed, summoning up the sensual memories from the many hours he has spent strolling along the forest floor, or suspended in its canopy.

“To begin with, it’s wonderful that you can walk through it. The canopy cuts off nearly all sunlight, and in the shade only a few low plants can grow. The forest is very still. In the canopy you disturb screeching birds and hear buzzing hummingbirds and howler monkeys. You see tropical orchids—as many as 40 species of flowers in one treetop—and brilliantly colored frogs, butterflies, and beetles. In contrast, the forest floor is much more sedate.

“If you keep very still, you may hear the chirping of katydids or cicadas. Lie down on the moist soil and you can see ten species of ants, and sometimes exotically camouflaged insects. Often you will hear the sudden roar of rain, like a locomotive bearing down on you. At first you don’t know the sound—you see, the forest canopy is so dense that it takes even the heaviest rain about ten minutes to filter through the vegetation. Then you’ll feel the warm drops falling from the treetops 150 feet above.

“To me, the only thing comparable is the experience of walking into one of the great cathedrals such as we have in England. You are awed, and humbled, and stilled. You walk out purged by an almost sacred beauty. And when you leave, you are determined to defend that building, or that forest, at any cost.”

Eugene H. Peterson is pastor of Christ Our King Presbyterian Church, Bel Air, Maryland, and author of A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (InterVarsity) and Answering God (Harper & Row), both of which are about the Psalms.

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