|
September-October 2007
|
< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4
He had another problem more difficult to quantify than the state of the exchequer. In essence, it was that the arboretum’s collection, unquestionably a horticultural treasure, was no longer so greatly valued by the botanists of the day, in part because if they wanted to study dawn redwoods, they wanted to go where dawn redwoods grow wild, to see them as part of a forest ecosystem. While the public ardently continued to stroll the arboretum’s leafy lanes and came in droves on Lilac Sunday, many academics had turned their backs. In her history of the arboretum, Science in the Pleasure Ground Into the tropical forest, there came in the early 1980s a challenger. “I am a dirt forest botanist,” says Ashton, “look at my ngernails.” (They look respectable.) “At the University of Iowa, later at Princeton, was a theoretician, Stephen Hubbell, who mathematically demonstrated the plausibility of sustaining 1,000 tree species in mixture over time because of constraints in how far their seeds will disperse. He got his data from a really big plot for this sort of demographic work, on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, a research island of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Steve came out with a conviction opposite to mine. He said that in fact the old boys were right, a tropical forest is a random mix. There was a meeting in Leeds, England, on tropical ecology. He gave a lecture; I was scandalized and invited him out to a pub for a few pints. We fought it out. We were both really right. He had studied a rather uniform piece of terrain, whereas I had looked at a heterogeneous one. If I had chosen one habitat within my Brunei landscape, I would have come to the same conclusion as he. In the pub, we decided that we needed much more data. That was the good part. We resolved to go to the National Science Foundation and try to get some money to establish a plot in the Far East that was a replica in size of his plot in Panama. I negotiated with the Forest Research Institute of Malaysia. I have always tried to keep an umbilical cord of collaboration, as an equal, with former Asian graduate students of mine—I correspond with them, write papers with them—to foster science in these areas vital for the conservation of the world’s resources. It was a relatively easy thing to say, ‘We’ve got this new idea. If I help raise funding, would you provide in-kind support—people, space, so forth? Would you be interested?’ They agreed enthusiastically.” In 1984 Ashton and the Malaysians marked out a big study plot (50 hectares, about 124 acres) in the forest at Pasoh. His aim was to inventory all the trees in this plot that were as thick at breast height as his thumb, or thicker—to measure, identify as to species, and tag them; to map the area and to repeat the inventory every ve years to see how the trees fared—which had died, which had prospered; and consider the lessons all this would teach. One plot led to another. In 1990 Ashton and Hubbell cofounded the Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. Today, CTFS manages 2o so-called Forest Dynamics Plots in 15 countries across the tropics in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. They hold a whopping four million catalogued trees of 6,000 species. Ashton coordinates work at the 11 Asian plots. Although tropical forests account for just 12 percent of the earth’s total land area, they may be home to more than 50 percent of all forms of terrestrial life. Each research plot is a living library of plants and animals, like a Library of Congress where most of the books have yet to be opened. Each elucidates the wondrous biological diversity of tropical forests, so variously populated that one imagines that the forces of natural selection and survival of the ttest have been revoked. Together, the plots form the only natural-ecosystem global network of any kind in existence and promise to yield bene cial insights into some of the world’s big problems. Ashton moved on from the arboretum’s directorship in 1987. He was professor of dendrology until 1991, when he became Bullard professor of forestry. He took emeritus status in 2004 but has yet to grasp the concept of retirement. Among his current undertakings, he is writing a book about rain forests for the nonspecialist, based on a lifetime’s learning about them close up in all but three of the nations of tropical Asia. He says it will be profusely illustrated with evocative color photographs that will portray his rain forests better than his words can do. He spends each fall semester at the Harvard University Herbaria in Cambridge, studying tropical forests with the aid of its vast library and more than ve million specimens. The rest of the time, when he isn’t in the tropics, he lives in England. “Not for nationalistic reasons, I promise you that,” he says. “I’m strongly antinationalistic. I live there for two reasons. In England, you can go up on a hill and look down and see the palimpsest of human activity going back to the Neolithic. I live in the old traction-engine shed of a farm in Somerset that is in the Domesday Book.” When he’s working on tropical forestry at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, he lives in London, in Chiswick, where he has a small garden “with a wild banana growing and a tree fern, can you believe it, and that is largely because of energy wastage in the great city.” The second reason he lives in Britain is because—as observed, he thinks, by expatriate American violinist Yehudi Menuhin—it has such a soft climate. 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | continued >  
 
 
|
, Ida Hay remarks that in each time of marked change in the institution’s affairs (there have been several), “the fear was voiced that the arboretum would become ‘a mere park,’ that science would desert the pleasure ground….” Ashton talked up the place to Harvard scholars in other biological departments. And he brought new interest to the arboretum’s tradition of doing research in Asia.