"A Yard of Jungle"
"A Yard of Jungle" retraces the footsteps of William Beebe (1877-1962), an American naturalist/explorer who, through his skillful descriptive writing and zoological expertise, both revolutionized and popularized field biology and wildlife ecology. In 1916, Beebe established the world's first tropical research station, in Kalacon, British Guiana.In 1917, while on one of the more than sixty scientific expeditions he undertook on behalf of the New York Zoological Society, Beebe dug up a square meter of earth in Belem, Brazil. He spent the steamship voyage back to New York City examining and classifying its contents.
Dion's reenactment of this project dramatizes the greedy obsession of nineteenth naturalists, who competed to collect and classify "unknown" species and be credited with their "discovery":
"Finding new species was the highest goal to which they aspired; squabbling about names and priority was an occupational disease; describing, arranging and collecting ever more and more species was the business to which they devoted every minute of their working lives.
One only has to read any naturalist's account of his first encounter with a new species to see the sort of wild excitement it induced. Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin's co-discoverer of the principle of natural selection, recalled that when he first saw the butterfly Ornithoptera croesus during his Malaysian travels, `My heart began to beat violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death. I had a headache the rest of the day.'"
(from The Heyday of Natural History 1820-1870, by Lynn Barber, 1980)
But "A Yard of Jungle" also reminds viewers of Beebe's discovery of tropical microfauna, the tiny, unglamorous forms of life that live in the soil. These had been ignored by scientists dazzled by the more colorful and exotic life forms of the jungle.
Though contemporary ecologists are well-versed in the need to preserve biodiversity, the general public still responds almost exclusively to appeals to save individually attractive species, not understanding that they can't survive outside of their own ecosystems. Yet it is difficult for conservation organizations to raise money for general ecosystems (with the exception of the rainforest, which, Dion says, "is perhaps the first case in which an ecosystem has become as charismatic as a whale or a zebra"), so fundraisers rely instead on sentimental posters and films featuring adorable, beautiful, and exotic creatures. "A Yard of Jungle" is a cautionary piece that calls attention to the importance of neglected life forms.