Thomas Marent's photographs of the world's rainforests bring us eyeball-to-eyeball with their wonders, writes Paddy Woodworth
The keel-billed toucan is a gorgeous bird. It has lemon-yellow plumage under its throat, lime-green eyeshadow, and an orange-red flush under its tail. Its comically outsize beak is splashed in all these colours, and blue, too. We tend to think of toucans as feel-good birds, perhaps because of their venerable association with the advertising of Guinness, recently revived. If we see them in a zoo we know they eat fruit, so a kind of healthy vegetarianism may reinforce their positive image. But when Thomas Marent's unblinking lens zooms in on a keel-bill on the River Sarapiquí, in Costa Rica, it reveals a harsher side of the toucan's character. The massive bill is crushing a tiny and naked fledgling, a protein supplement snatched from a neighbour's nest.
Marent's new book, Rainforest: A Photographic Journey, is unflinching in its presentation of the eternal cycles of predation that make up the natural world, though it hardly shows nature red in tooth and claw - Marent's work is too subtle and tasteful for that. So when a mantis tears the head off one of its peers, or another insect crushes its prey in a spiky embrace worthy of the Inquisition, it is the luminosity and strangeness of his images that startle, not their incipient horror.
His text, however, repeatedly stresses the variety and scale of carnage that the rainforests engender, sometimes approaching the tone of Ripley's Believe It or Not! Thus we learn that a tiny poison dart frog (aptly named Pyllobates terribilis) is "reputedly lethal to the touch . . . packs enough punch to kill 50 people". We meet butterflies that "exude an acrid froth that contains cyanide".
This kind of mayhem is not restricted to animals. The strangler fig builds a framework around its host tree, then starves its canopy of light, finally standing tall, alone and hollow after the body of its victim has decomposed in its deadly embrace.
The rainforest environment certainly offers plenty of evidence for the argument against Wordsworth's piously romantic view of nature, as challenged by Aldous Huxley in his essay Wordsworth in the Tropics: "A voyage through the tropics would have cured of his too easy and comfortable pantheism. A few months in the jungle would have convinced him that the diversity and utter strangeness of Nature are at least as real and significant as its intellectually discovered unity."
In some ways Marent's tough realism is refreshing in a book sponsored by the Rainforest Foundation. Even today, conservation too often offers a soft-focus view of the wild. This anthropomorphic vision remakes nature in images that appeal to robin-strokers and animal-rights activists, screening out the falcon stooping on the fluffy dove, the weasel's tooth at the rabbit's jugular. Marent is never guilty of this kind of censorship. Even his cuddly spectral tarsier is shot while scrunching a rather beautiful insect.
For all the radiance of his images, however, and for all the myriad creatures his camera captures so brilliantly, his constant emphasis on predation and competition can also become excessively anthropomorphic in a different direction. Is it really appropriate, for example, to talk of an "evolutionary arms race" in the rainforest?
In his illuminating recent book Nature Cure, the English writer Richard Mabey questions the legacy of dogmatic Darwinism on our thinking about, and relationship with, the natural world, and crude Darwinism dominates Marent's text. We obviously owe the great Victorian an enormous debt for his contribution to the theory of evolution, but Darwin was a man of his time. The dominant (and brutal) ideology of Manchester capitalism shaped, and arguably warped, his view of relationships between species. Other naturalists have suggested that evolution may owe as much to co-operation as to competition.
Marent does touch on this point, especially in his exquisitely illustrated section on the propagation of pollen through insects and birds, but a clearer focus on it would have enriched the book.
Mabey writes of pleasure as well as pain in nature, and not just the pleasure of eating something that one has just killed. He speaks of birds of prey in flight revealing "a wilful, gratuitous, relishing of the wind". He dares to see elements of comedy at work in the wild, and he talks of moments when "it seems as if the whole company of nature, ourselves included, is simply at play".
The US poet Leonard Nathan speaks of finding, in the plumage of a snow bunting, "an eloquence that goes beyond biological purpose, a superfluous beauty".
Strip away a lot of Marent's text, and look at his images in that broader context, and they become even more powerful, and much more moving.
What of the rainforests themselves? Everybody wants to save the rainforests now. Even the Irish Farmers' Association has begun carrying banners about biodiversity in the tropics on its protest marches. IFA leaders are asking us to boycott Brazilian beef, not because they want to continue to milk a grotesquely protectionist EU agricultural policy, perish the thought. No, they want to stop the nasty Brazilian ranchers from cutting down all those lovely trees.
Irish, European and North American ranchers, however, have been cutting down trees since time immemorial. How do you think the ecological jewel we call the Burren came about? That botanical wonderland is not a gift from Mother Nature, it's a gift from the Neolithic farmers who seem to have overgrazed every inch of soil on the coast of Co Clare. The relationship between agriculture and the natural environment is a very complex one. We will need to offer much better arguments, and much better incentives, than those offered by the IFA if we are to persuade the Brazilians, and others, not to do in this century what we have done over the past 5,000 years.
Nevertheless, it's significant that the IFA strategists think that bleating about the rainforest issue might win them public support. It indicates how very deeply the threat to the Amazon basin has penetrated our popular culture. The notion that these forests are "the lungs of the world", and that every hectare cleared pushes our planet closer to asphyxiation, must be one of the most widely held views of our time.
Still, most of us are only vaguely aware of what a rainforest really looks like, close up. Marent gets in so close you can see the mosquitoes on a caiman's eyelids and the mites on a caterpillar's body hair. Then he pulls back and shows us a panorama that may not exist for very much longer: a tree canopy stretching as far as the eye can see in every direction, a glorious riot of life.
Marent does not show us the advance of the excavators ripping out the trees. Nor does he show us the places where the rainforest is once again advancing a little, brought back by ecological restoration, especially in Costa Rica and even in parts of Brazil. He does hint that nature may be a little more resilient than some ecologists tell us. But if things continue at the rate they are going today, it is certain that there will be no rainforests left in half a century.
Rainforest is a telling reminder that, if our sense of awe before the natural world has not atrophied entirely, the world's rainforests are worth saving, not only for their crucial contribution to ecosystem services, such as clean air, or for their value to medicine. They are worth saving for themselves, for the wondrous creatures that inhabit them and make them what they are.
But if we really do want to save them, we will have to pay for them. That means changing our consumerist lifestyles, here and now, in the West. And we have to find ways to make saving the forests attractive economically to the people who live beside them and in them. To ask anything more of them, or less of ourselves, is eco-imperialism, pure and simple. And that is not only immoral and repulsive: it simply will not work.
Rainforest: A Photographic Journey, by Thomas Marent, is published by Dorling Kindersley, £25 in UK