Pierre Poivre and the Networking Naturalists

Although climate change is seen as a very 21st-century concern, back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century naturalists around the world in places as far apart as Mauritius in the Indian ocean and St Vincent in the Caribbean were becoming aware of what they referred to as desiccation, the drying of the land and absence of rainfall due to the cutting down of large swathes of forest trees.

This book traces the connections between those naturalists, scientists and men of letters to reveal the surprising truths that they discovered and which must inspire us to follow the trail they blazed.

Gillian Jones has travelled widely, first as a teacher and subsequently with the British Council. In 1971, flying from Colombia to Brazil, over endless miles of green forest canopy, she was startled to see a yellow- orange gash in the greenery, a mark which signalled the start of the Amazonian Highway. It was an image that stayed with her and later she would write her screenplay about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest: one which has still to reach the silver screen. She took courses with the Open University on Environmental Ethics and followed up with a novel, Blade of Light, the first of a trilogy of ‘stories of suspense with an ecological edge’. Gillian grew up in Kent, surrounded by Kentish cobnut trees. She is a fellow of the Linnean Society of London.