WHEN Dona Cabola wants to know where to plant her crops, she watches the bees. She has the jeito, wisdom accumulated over generations – and is just one of the entrancing characters we meet on David Campbell’s expedition to record the plants in his Amazon study site.
Campbell, who is now professor of nations and the global environment at Grinnell College, Iowa, first documented Amazonian trees new to science some 30 years ago. Some have since disappeared forever. But he is well aware that the vanishing rainforest is “stale news”. A Land of Ghosts is not another woeful chronicle of…
