Abstract:
Whether there is a future for tropical ecology, and of what it will consist, does
not lie in the unveiling of yet another intricate animal-plant interaction, in the
application of technological marvels, or in the discovery of a crop plant that
can be grown with high yield on rainforest soils. The answer does not lie in
meticulous analysis of what we know to date.
Yes, we need these things. But the real future of tropical ecology lies in
whether, within our generation, the academic, social and commercial sectors
can collaboratively preserve even small portions of tropical wildlands to be
studied and used for understanding, for material gain, and for the intellectual
development of the society in which the wildland is embedded. The tropical
ecologist has a clear mandate to be a prominent guide and glue in this
collaboration. Ecologists are specialists at understanding interactions between
complex units and their environments; the future of tropical ecology lies,
above all, in the interface between humanity and the tropical nature that
humanity has corralled. It is this generation of ecologists who will determine
whether the tropical agroscape is to be populated only by humans and their
mutualists, commensals, and parasites, or whether it will also contain some
islands of the greater nature-the nature that spawned humans yet has been
vanquished by them. An ocean of oil palm plantations, no matter how
sustained the yield and no matter how well-fed the caretakers, is no more
human destiny, nor is it of more ecological interest, than is any other
assembly line.
