Forests of Plenty? Comparisons and Conclusions
The writings of John Muir were a key part of the early advocacy for the preservation of ‘wilderness’ areas in the United States. I hope to have demonstrated throughout this book that tropical forests are no longer a ‘monstrous and boundless thicket, with no way of escape’ (Chapter 1), and hold an important place in our biological and cultural history. Yet, while this certainly makes tropical forests key priorities for conservation, I also hope to have shown that they should not be seen as static or ‘wild’. The development of new methodologies, theoretical realization that these environments are not ‘primeval’ or ‘impenetrable’, and a growth of research interest and funding are beginning to reimagine these environments as variable, dynamic, and important stages for human action. In this concluding chapter I argue that it is now time to move beyond dichotomies of whether tropical forests are ‘pristine’ or whether they have been constantly occupied and modified by humans through ongoing ‘niche construction’ (Roberts et al., 2017a). Instead, we are now able to begin to study, in detail, the sheer diversity of tropical forest ‘prehistories’, ‘histories’, and ‘modernities’ accessible to archaeologists, historians, palaeoecologists, and anthropologists. However, I want to go even further than the simple acknowledgement that a recent growth of data from, and interest in, tropical forests has given them greater visibility in discussions of human adaptations, past and present. Instead, I wish to evaluate to what extent the information from these habitats can play a theoretical and methodological role in narratives of the human ‘Universe’ more broadly. To do this I return to a series of themes developed in Chapter 1 that pitch discussions of Miocene and Pleistocene tropical forest occupation, indigenous agricultural developments and external introductions, tropical forest urbanism, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic tropical forest foraging and farming against patterns of behaviour in other environments.