Archipelago : Islands of Indonesia - Hardcover

Daws, Gavan; Fujita, Marty

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520215761 ISBN 13: 9780520215764

Publisher: University of California Press, 1999

Synopsis

The Indonesian archipelago is a land of timeless natural beauty that in the twenty-first century faces unprecedented environmental degradation. It was also the biological laboratory of Alfred Russel Wallace, who, working independently of Charles Darwin, discovered the theory of evolution by natural selection.

Wallace, who traveled for eight years in the archipelago, was one of the greatest field naturalists and nature writers of his century. No one was more skilled in observing and describing living things. A prodigious collector, he was the first to bring living birds of paradise to the West. And he was a great thinker, a theorist as formidable as any on earth. This magnificent account of a true explorer sweeps from the time of Wallace's nineteenth-century discoveries in biogeography to the looming biodiversity crisis of the twenty-first century—from the exploration of natural wonders to the exploitation of natural resources. The result is a history that powerfully portrays the intricate connections of human life and natural life.

This unique story, published by the University of California Press in cooperation with The Nature Conservancy, is resplendently presented with maps, archival materials, and more than 200 color photographs.

A portion of the proceeds from this book will go toward conservation efforts in Indonesia

About this title

Review:

In the mid-1850s, a young English naturalist named Alfred Russel Wallace journeyed to the Malay Archipelago, where he would spend eight years in what he later called "the central and controlling incident" of his life. Collecting data on the plant and animal life of the then-remote islands, Wallace slowly formulated ideas of the origins and divergence of species. In 1858, he sent a manuscript containing some of those ideas to Charles Darwin, who incorporated Wallace's work in his theory of natural selection--and who, some critics have charged, appropriated many of Wallace's discoveries as his own.

In this richly illustrated book, historian Gavan Daws and biologist Marty Fujita follow Wallace's trail through the islands of Indonesia, visiting the Moluccas, Bali, Irian Jaya, and other extraordinary treasuries of biological diversity--for, as they point out, although Indonesia comprises only 1.3 percent of the world's surface, it harbors nearly a quarter of the world's species. Their naturalistic travelogue includes a careful discussion of Wallace's ideas and of how he came to hold them through the course of his remarkable body of fieldwork. In doing so, they emphasize the importance of Wallace's contributions to demographics, the theory of island biodiversity, and other tenets of modern biological thought. The result is an unusually instructive, and unusually handsome, book of scientific adventure. --Gregory McNamee

From the Inside Flap:

"The narrative is extraordinary for its storytelling quality, making even the collection of beetles seem like high adventure." —Frank Stewart, author of A Natural History of Nature Writing

"Alfred Russel Wallace was a great field biologist, a heroic pioneer, and a peculiar but extraordinarily decent man--altogether, one of the most appealing scientific figures of the past two centuries. In the Malay Archipelago he found a world of wonders that led him toward wondrous insights. Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita have done a fine service by putting those two--the man and the archipelago--into one big frieze. This is a lovely, valuable book."—David Quammen, author of The Song of the Dodo, Wild Thoughts from Wild Places, and Natural Acts

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0520215761
• ISBN 13: 9780520215764
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 266