DEEP JUNGLE is an exploration of the most alien & feared habitat on earth. Starting with man's earliest recorded adventures, Fred Pearce adventures high into the canopy
- home to two-thirds of all the creatures on our planet, many of them never coming down to earth. Even now, new species of animals are being discovered. & Pearce discovers secrets about how evolution works, the intricate links that connect us all, & maybe even clues to where humans came from.
The jungle holds the key to our future foods & medicines, our climate & to our understanding of how life works. At the start of a new millennium Pearce asks why we continue to waste precious time
- & billions of dollars
- looking for signs of life elsewhere in our universe when the greatest range of life-forms that have ever existed lies right here on our doorstep. Today environmentalists say we are on the verge of destroying the last rainforests, & with it the planet's evolutionary crucible, & maybe even its ability to maintain life on Earth. But nature has a way of getting its own back. The Mayans & the people of Angkor went too far in manipulating nature & paid the ultimate price. Their civilisations died & the jungle returned. Nature reclaimed it's own & it may do so again.. .