For thirty years David Campbell has been conducting ecological studies in the Brazilian Amazon. It is a place of extraordinary abundance: in the eighteen hectares of rainforest Campbell has studied are 20, 000 individual trees of about 2, 000 species
- three times as many species of trees as there are in all of North America. & each tree is an ecosystem in itself, bearing fungi, lichens, mosses, reptiles, mammals, birds, spiders, scorpions, beetles & uncountable legions of insects. Campbell knows each tree on his study sites as an individual.
River of Light is the story of the Amazonian rainforest of Brazil, its flora & fauna, & of the people who try to live on this frontier so vast that they seem eclipsed by it
- the colonists from eastern Brazil, the caboclos who eke out a living in the river or forest, & the Native Americans, who once understood every nuance of the forest & had a name for every one of its species, but are now dislocated & confused, coveting Western ways but unable to grasp them. These people, wittingly or unwittingly, are destroying the forest, & Campbell's book is at once a description of a world that is vanishing fast & a plea for its survival.
In The Crystal Desert, his first, highly-praised book, David Campbell wrote about Antarctica, a place where only a handful of species have managed to climb ashore & survive. In the Amazon Valley there are more species of lichens, liverworts, mosses & algae on a single palm leaf than there are growing on the entire continent of Antarctica. It is a fine canvas for Campbell to paint his extraordinary word pictures upon.