In the Open

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume 80, 30 November 1945, Page 6

In the Open

JUNGLE RESPITE (By I. W. T. Munro) Many prophets have been confounded by the atomic bomb and the promise in it of the harnessing of atomic power. Up to a decade ago, many competent scientises believed that it would never be done, and were casting about for sources of energy to be used when the earth’s supply of oil and coal was exhausted. Man has consumed, recklessly and wastefully, in a century, stores of coal and oil that took the earth thousands of years to accumulate. Despite the rapid increase in consumption, oil supplies have lasted longer than was expected, for. If the warnings issued by experts in 1920 had been correct, we should have been feeling the pinch by now. The hydrogenation of coal, a process brought to a high pitch of efficiency in Germany, eked out the petrol requirements of the Nazi armies, but that is good only so long as the coal supply lasts. The tides, it was prophesied, would be harnessed to provide electrical power for industrial centres, but could not be adapted to the needs of sea and air transport. For this reason, some of the prophets forecast a shift of economic dominion by the end of the present c. tury from the temperate zone to the nations of the tropical rain forest belt. ALCOHOL FROM SUGAR Their climate would enable them, it was prophesied, to raise several crops a year of plants rich in sugar, which could be fermented and distilled for power alcohol to replace petrol. These prophets forecast the clearing of the great forests of the Congo and Amazon basins, as yet only partly explored, for plantations, with hydro-electric works on the rivers providing nitrogenous fertilisers against the inevitable impoverishment of the soil. Such a project would have meant, inevitably, the extinction not only of a vast array of birds and animals peculiar to the tropical rain forests, but also of many interesting forest folk whose ways of life have been adapted over the centuries to the special requirements of their environment. It is unlikely that they would take kindly to the life of agricultural labourers. The harnessing of atomic energy promises a respite for all the curious beasts and birds of the rain forest belt and for the quaint, nomadic pigmy folk that hunt them with arrows from blow-pipes or from diminutive bows, for the hardwood trees of those forests are almost impervious either to axe or to fire, and only dire pressure will ever justify so huge an undertaking as it would be to clear them.