Jungle

For many of us, jungles are the domain of films like Tarzan or Cast Away and feel far removed from our everyday lives. But across the entire world they influence temperature, create rainfall, clean the air, stabilise soils and provide food and materials for essential products, such that the future of humankind is intertwined with their disappearing wildlife and impending destruction. As Dr Patrick Roberts shows in this startlingly revisionist history of the world, this symbiotic relationship with tropical forests is anything but a recent development.