The Tree Where Man Was Born by Peter Matthiessen and Eliot Porter Harvill, 247pp, £30 in UK
Before David Attenborough and the BBC's Natural History Unit there was the nature writing of Peter Matthiessen and the photographs of Eliot Porter. In 1961, when they started travelling the wilds of East Africa, Nairobi was still a frontier town where gazelle and zebra wandered the airport road. Joy Adamson's Born Free (about Elsa, the lioness) was a soaring bestseller. Meryl Streep hadn't heard of Karen Blixen. Jomo Kenyatta was coming out of jail to be the first president of Kenya.
Such orientation seems necessary for a book that was published originally in 1972 and which appears now, in Matthiessen's 71st year, as a large-format reprint of "a classic work". It is not, perhaps, quite that: it lacks the inner life and sense of quest which marked The Snow Leopard, or the epic, sombre wholeness of Mens' Lives. There was too much going on in East Africa through the 1960s - too much upheaval, too much to be explained - to give the book that sort of distillation and repose.
Matthiessen's intense observation and the quality of his descriptive prose certainly are classic. His travels by Land Rover and his sojourns in the bush feed the imagination with marvellously cumulative word-pictures, some with all the raw excitement of adventure stories. With the collapse of colonial governments, the destruction of wildlife by rampaging Africans was widely predicted, and "a glimpse of the last great companies of wild animals on earth" was what drew him to the Serengeti and other vast game plains in Tanzania and Kenya. His descriptions of great herds of elephants, cooped up into restricted habitats, bring home the problems of managing their survival.
"Beneath the plane, the elephant mass moved like grey lava, leaving behind a ruined bog of mud and twisted trees . . ." On the ground, Matthiessen stalks them with George Schaller, the field biologist: "Then the bull scented us - the hot wind was shifting every moment - and the dark wings flared, filling the sky, and the air was split wide by that ultimate scream that the elephant gives in alarm or agitation, that primordial warped horn note out of oldest Africa."
Since that was written, the elephants of East Africa have undergone another twenty-six years of the carnage of the ivory trade. In Kenya the population plummeted from 167,000 animals in 1973 to fewer than 20,000 by 1990; Tanzania lost three-quarters of its herds, and in Uganda they were virtually wiped out. In furious debates on conservation strategy and the wisdom of culling, only "sustainable use" of wildlife seems to have much of a political future.
Ecology, meanwhile, is making it seem even harder for man to come to terms with the elephant's need for Lebensraum. Biologists now believe that the herds' destruction of trees and bushes, which so awed Matthiessen, is a natural mechanism, essential to Africa's teeming biodiversity. By opening up new spaces in woodland and bush, this "keystone herbivore" creates the mosaic of habitats for a whole legion of species - browsers and grazers, insects and birds. But ecosystem engineering on such an elephantine scale does not lend itself easily to the grudging boundaries of game parks.
As a naturalist, Matthiessen has loved the solitary experience of landscape and wildlife, and this is what generates his finest writing. But his credentials as humanist are also considerable, and his reputation in America is also as a crusader for minority rights, as in his book Indian Country. In The Tree Where Man Was Born, the Maasai and Llo-molo are as empathetically considered as anything else in the landscape: Matthiessen enjoys people.
Even after a couple of decades of intensive colour photography of East Africa and its wildlife, the late Eliot Porter's pictures - more than a hundred of them - stand with the best. While the book as a whole is concerned with turmoil and change, his images have a serenity, a monumental composition, that makes them timeless.