MICHAEL CRICHTON

Amy never strayed far from the group again.If Elliot had an uncomfortable sense of the rain forest as the natural domain ofhis own animal, Karen Ross viewed it in terms of earth resources—in which itwas poor. She was not fooled by the luxuriant, oversized vegetation, which sheknew represented an extraordinarily efficient ecosystem built in virtually barrensoil.*The developing nations of the world did not understand this fact; once cleared,the jungle soil yielded disappointing crops. Yet the rain forests were beingcleared at the incredible rate of fifty acres a minute, day and night. The rainforests of the world had circled the equator in a green belt for at least sixty millionyears—but man would have cleared them within twenty years.This widespread destruction had caused some alarm Ross did not share. Shedoubted that the world climate would change or the atmospheric oxygen bereduced. Ross was not an alarmist, and not impressed by the calculations ofthose who were. The only reason she felt uneasy was that the forest was so littleunderstood. A clearing rate of fifty acres a minute meant that plant and animalspecies were becoming extinct at the incredible rate of one species per hour. Lifeforms that had evolved for millions of years were being wiped out* The rain forest ecosystem is an energy utilization complex far more efficientthan any energy conversion system developed by man. See C. F. Higgins et at.,Energy Resources and Ecosystem Utilization (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. PrenticeHall, 1977). pp. 232—255.every few minutes, and no one could predict the consequences of thisstupendous rate of destruction. The extinction of species was proceeding muchfaster than anybody recognized, and the publicized lists of “endangered” speciestold only a fraction of the story; the disaster extended all the way down theanimal phyla to insects, worms, and mosses.The reality was that entire ecosystems were being destroyed by man without acare or a backward glance. And these ecosystems were for the most partmysterious, poorly understood. Karen Ross felt herself plunged into a world135