White Gold: The Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon 1906-1916

White Gold: The Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon 1896 – 1906, is a tale of humanity and the natural order working together in the midst of greed and ignorance. The crisis of the Amazon rainforest began more than a century ago when prospectors discovered the region was a rich source for rubber. This brought commercial interests into collision with the Amazon’s complex ecology―its plants, animals, and people. At the height of the rubber boom in the beginning of the 20th century, a young American, John Yungjohann, went to seek his fortune as a rubber cutter in Brazil, only to find himself struggling for survival. White Gold‘s editor, Sir Ghillean Prance, leading expert of the rainforest and former director (emeritus) of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, England, has enhanced Yungjohann’s text with his own contemporary photographs and identified the fungi, plants and animals mentioned in the pages of the diary. Yungjohann’s words are especially poignant today as an onslaught of extractivist policies threaten the Amazon and rain destruction upon the region, its incomprehensible biodiversity, and the peoples to which it is home.

author of White Gold: The Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon 1906-1916

Former Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, UK, Dr.Prance is a leading figure in the ecology, taxonomy and ethnobotany of the Amazon Basin. From 1981 to 1988, he served as the Vice-President for Science at the New York Botanical Garden and as Founding-Director of the New York Botanical Garden's Institute of Economic Botany. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London and the Explorers Club, a Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, and a Corresponding Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.