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September-October 2007
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 Brunei, on the island of Borneo, is about the size of Rhode Island. At that time, says Ashton, “more than 70 percent of Borneo was covered in primeval, uncut, forest. Now, little remains, even to the mountain tops, except in the national parks—themselves threatened by illegal harvesting—and inaccessible limestone peaks.” Yesterday’s forest, “with about 800 tree species and teeming with critters,” he says, “has been converted into a forest with a single tree species, most often oil palm, and the brown rat—and barn owls and king cobras.” Ashton set about writing taxonomic accounts of the timber trees, particularly the dipterocarps: what used to be called Philippine mahoganies, huge trees that dominate the canopy. No one knew which or how many species were there. He ended up with descriptions of 156 dipterocarp species and rough records of many other species. “There are about 3,000 tree species in Brunei,” he says. “in other words, 10 times the number of species in the United States. So it was a huge task.” In the process of doing the job, he spent 28 months in longhouses or under canvas with the indigenous Iban Dayak, a tribe once known for their headhunting achievements. “I learned my botany from them. I had no library, just a couple of books and no herbarium. I had four Dayak collectors and tree climbers. They didn’t have any English, and I jumped in at the deep end. They were wonderful people, good company, with a robust sense of humor and a theology close to my own. They would climb these trees—70 meters, you know—sit out on a branch, smoke a cigarette, speak to the gibbons, and possibly urinate on you if you were sitting close by on the ground.” A couple of these Dayak colleagues were in the audience when Ashton accepted his Japan Prize at a ceremony in Tokyo (see “Harmonious Coexister Honored”). “They were totally marvelous, with tattoos down their necks, and I was in a wing collar.” He saluted these early masters in his acceptance speech. Ashton made a major discovery in Brunei. Although no rigorous research into the matter had been done, the then current wisdom of John Corner and other leading tropical botanists held that the extraordinary coexistence of so many tree species in a tropical forest is the result of a random distribution process—that the mix of species changes with each new generation of trees as the image in a kaleidoscope changes with a twist of the barrel, and that the reason a few dominant species don’t take over the forest and drive diversity out is that the seeds of forest-tree species are not widely dispersed, but fall close to their parents. The random-mix theory implies that the species are ecologically complementary, which has implications for speciation and evolution, says Ashton. It also suggests that forest managers can’t do much to encourage one species over another. But Ashton began to realize that the forests he tramped through were not just a random mix. As he moved onto different soils—sandstone or shale—more than half the species changed. He noticed that each hill possessed a distinct species assemblage, repeated on other hills with similar soil nutrients and drainage. “I got permission from the forest service to put in some small study plots and analyze them by methods current at that time,” says Ashton. “I was accepted eventually as a graduate student and went back to Cambridge and clunked away with a hand calculator on my data. I showed quantitatively that indeed there was a relationship between habitat and the species composition of forests, and that was hugely important.” He moved his attention to Sarawak, next door to Brunei, and conducted similar studies in a much bigger area, about the size of New England. “I was doing a lot of eld work, but I was married by then and had small children and education priorities and so forth, and so I started looking for other jobs. I began to realize to my great disappointment that my only choice might be to go into academia, kicking and screaming—into the ivory tower as opposed to the green forest, to lose the smell of resin in the air, other than from the waxing of the oor. And that’s how it worked.” Ashton truly loves the tropics. He gave an interview to U.S. public radio after he won his Japan Prize and was asked to recall his favorite moment in the forest. “Just to go along those ridges at about 3,000 feet in Borneo day after day, with a basket with your food on your back,” he replied, “and to listen to the water cascading down in those valleys, to look at the clouds accumulating on the ridges, knowing that it’s going to pelt with rain by midday and that you’ll strip off everything but your sneakers and your underwear, put all your clothes in a plastic bag, and walk on with that streaming rain all over your body until it stops an hour or two later, then put your clothes back on again and think, ‘Wow, this is the tropics, and there’s no better place in the world.’” Ashton gave up capsizes in the rapids, pit-viper encounters, and camps pulverized by storms to take a steady job as a lecturer in botany within the ancient stone walls of the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. During the following 12 years there, he trained many Asian students who would inherit stewardship of their countries’ forest resources —in India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Malaysia, and Indonesia.
In 1978, he came over to New England with his wife, Mary, and their three children to take on the posts of director of the Arnold Arboretum and Arnold professor of botany. The arboretum, established in 1872, is an oasis of 265 acres in the Jamaica Plain section of Boston, landscaped by Frederick Law Olmsted in collaboration with its rst director, Charles Sprague Sargent. It has a mission to be schizophrenic. First, it was founded to grow every tree and shrub, indigenous or exotic, that can be grown in the open air in hard-climate Boston. Such a living museum collection was for many years considered by botanists to have great research value. Second, through a creative leasing arrangement, the arboretum became part of Boston’s park system, although Harvard remains in control of the collection. The park is open to the public, free of charge, from dawn to dusk every day of the year; the public has always loved it. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
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