The Future of Tropical Ecology

Abstract

Whether there is a future for tropical ecology, and of what it will consist, does not lie in the unveiling of yet another intricate animal-plant interaction, in the application of technological marvels, or in the discovery of a crop plant that can be grown with high yield on rainforest soils. The answer does not lie in meticulous analysis of what we know to date. Yes, we need these things. But the real future of tropical ecology lies in whether, within our generation, the academic, social and commercial sectors can collaboratively preserve even small portions of tropical wildlands to be studied and used for understanding, for material gain, and for the intellectual development of the society in which the wildland is embedded. The tropical ecologist has a clear mandate to be a prominent guide and glue in this collaboration. Ecologists are specialists at understanding interactions between complex units and their environments; the future of tropical ecology lies, above all, in the interface between humanity and the tropical nature that humanity has corralled. It is this generation of ecologists who will determine whether the tropical agroscape is to be populated only by humans and their mutualists, commensals, and parasites, or whether it will also contain some islands of the greater nature-the nature that spawned humans yet has been vanquished by them. An ocean of oil palm plantations, no matter how sustained the yield and no matter how well-fed the caretakers, is no more human destiny, nor is it of more ecological interest, than is any other assembly line. My goal here, then, is not to review the trajectory of the literature generated by studies of tropical ecology and biology, but rather to outline what is clearly becoming the structure of tropical ecology's future. My inferences and guid-