"TROPICAL RAINFOREST" "Imagine we are travelers in time, it's now 400 million years ago." "Some of the most primitive of plants, the ferns, cover almost all the land." "And now a hundred million years have passed." "The dominance of ferns is ending and the trees with different leaves with trunks and spreading branches, are beginning to appear." "We've burst upon a new, fantastic era." "Tropical rainforests have begun." "Imagine now it's 60 million years ago." "The dinosaurs have come - and gone." "The insects, who were here before, still thrive." "The forest is a tangled weave of plants, competing for the nutrients and light." "Multitudes of life forms are emerging." "Static life-the fungi, plants and trees  support a mobile world, the insects and the rest, who move about in search of food." "Every morning, moist and sun- warmed air starts rising, prelude to the mid-day clouds." "And every afternoon the rain descends as tropical rainforests round the planet live up to their hot and humid name." "Every day since time on Earth began, the sun has traced a beam of energy and heat a band around the Earth's equator." "And so the daily dose of sun and water keeps the tropic landscape nourished, slowly shaping, changing every form of life." "And still there's 50 million years or more to go before the early humans come." "Coming out to taste the air, the forest's creatures of the night are just as varied -and as numerous - as those of day." "At dawn the 12 hours night becomes another 12 of the day." "There are no seasons, only light and darkness, rain and sunshine, week by week, and month on month, from year to hundred million year." "Within this cycle grows the largest single living thing the land has ever seen -the tree, the very fabric of the forest." "Many times the size of dinosaurs that trampled round their roots so long ago, the trees are part of the variety of many thousand different flowering plants." "But why so many shapes and colors?" "How did they arrive at such complexity?" "Many creatures blend in with their backgrounds." "How did they acquire this camouflage?" "Every complicated organism has its origin in something simpler." "Every form of life has ancestors that were among the earliest on Earth..." "Each individual is, by random chance, just marginally different from its parents." "Just occasionally, variations proves a slight advantage for survival." "Under evolutionary pressure, those with an advantage tend to thrive while other lines die out, they don't succeed." "And after millions of generations, minute alterations, step by step emerge." "And so much time and evolution's passed that life is able to perform what seems like magic as an everyday event." "All of evolution works this way." "Now it is 20 million years ago." "The number and variety of species is increasing rapidly and filling every nook and cranny in the forest." "Land which one day will be given names like Borneo, Sumatra, Java," "Queensland, Thailand, Burma, India, Madagascar, Congo," "Cameroon, the Amazon, the central isthmus of America, they all are covered by this luscious forest." "Diversity if undisturbed by major changes, leads to more diversity." "Birds - related to the dinosaurs - diversify to many shapes and sizes, feeding off the different fruits and flowers, spreading seeds and pollen through the forest." "The age of mammals has arrived." "The only mammals that can fly are bats, which, by locating echoes, see with sound." "The lemurs, relatives of early primates, look around with large and ghostly eyes." "By hour, by day, by decade, year and century, time, it rolls inexorably on." "Individual trees may live a hundred years or more and then will fall or die." "The toppled giant leaves a gaping hole which plants and younger trees will rush to fill." "The energy contained within the fabric of the tree is never lost or wasted." "Termites quickly go to work, and soon the forest floor reclaims what it supplied, as everything recycles through the system." "The new trees race to fill the gap." "Within a year or so the surface of the woven canopy has been restored." "Everything is used and used again." "The need for food and space for living leads to complicated patterns of behavior." "Time and circumstances lead one type of ant to harvest leaves as food for fungus." "As it grows, the fungus breaks the chewed leaves down converting it to food for ants." "Such intimate relationships are frail and one can not exist without the other." "Symbiotic harmony like this is found across the forest." "While one species may rely on others for survival, all of them rely upon the trees." "And now we've reached 2 million years ago." "The monkeys, apes and other agile primates have evolved, diversified, adapted." "Eating almost everything they can, they travel swiftly through the upper branches." "Time travelers, we've nearly reached the present day, it's just ten thousand years ago." "Humans have evolved and use the trees in ways no animals have done before." "Within the last 200 years our tools have changed." "Our use of trees has much increased." "Now, today, it's we the humans that have brought the biggest change that tropical rainforests round the world have ever seen." "And now, the very moment that our tools enable us to harvest forest whole, we suddenly can see the bigger picture." ""I'm Bob Caine." "Coming up on the International Hour, we'll examine new ecological reports on tropical rainforests."" ""Thousands of acres of rain forest are destroyed worldwide everyday, making room for crops and cattle and roads." "Up to 40% of the Earth's oxygen comes from these forests."" ""Scientists expressed a continued concern about the potential devastating effects of rain forest burning."" ""The area known as..." "These fires, which produced 20% of the worlds fossil fuel carbon dioxide are a major contributor to the greenhouse effect."" ""...70% of prescription drugs sold in the US come from plants found only in a rainforest-environment."" ""...and since the 1990's, depending on how governments react to plans, things will get much better or much worse." "Environmental problems transcend the borders of local nation states."" ""...in something akin to a total mobilization of all society."" ""...make peace with ourselves." "Now it is time to make peace with nature."" "...peace with nature... 400 million years of evolution, 4 minutes and a chainsaw brings it down." "The giants of the forest have been felled, together with the life they sustain." "Species, which no human's ever seen are driven to extinction every day." "If the clearing of the trees continues, 50 years could see these forests gone, and with them the grand variety of biological diversities." "The challenge is to understand the rapid changes we have wrought upon our planet." "The tropical rainforests of the world have shrunk dramatically." "Few of them remain untouched, available for study." "Botanists, biologist, the chemists entomologist and all who wish to analyze the forest ecosystems will sometimes travel several thousand miles to reach a tiny airstrip and a research site that's largely undisturbed." "I was staggered by how much there is to see and hear in the forest." "Doing research is a challenge in these places." "The tropical forests all around the Earth cover less, than seven percent of the land surface." "We've only just, in the last 50 to 100 years, begun to understand the biological history of this place." "We're learning from ongoing research that more, than 90% of the world's species the ants, birds, mammals, plants, bugs of all kinds - live in the tropics." "It's the very biology of our planet." "Everything we look at has some aspect here that is quite unknown." "The more time I spend in the rainforest, the more carefully I look, the more I see." "As humans, standing on the ground we often only see the world that's at our feet, we need to look around, above our hands." "I have been studying the small group of trees for more than 10 years," "and each time I come up I'm just amazed to find species of plants that I have never seen before." "...There are over 28000 species of plants that actually live out their entire lives up here in the treetops." "...I want to know what this incredibly abundant group of plants is doing to the forest." "How do these plants affect the trees?" "How do they affect the birds?" "How do the birds affect them?" "What would the forest be like if these plants, these epiphytes weren't here?" "As a kid I was always up in the trees, and I know my mother who is afraid of heights, still shakes her head in wonder when she realizes what her daughter does for a living." "The results of my research surprises me." "I've learned that nearly half of the mineral nutrients in the green foliage of the forest are contained in the epiphytes themselves." "The feeling that I might discover something entirely new up here is a major motivation for the science that I do." "Ground-based scientists, however agile, can not ever reach the topmost part, the surface of the forest canopy." "A team of air-borne scientist have found a novel way of getting round the problem." "It is wonderful being here!" "Floating on a moving ocean of green is like being at see, except for the sound - monkeys, insects, birds and frogs!" "Up here where there was most sunlight, you could feel the impact of the whole forest, containing millions of different species." "Sometimes the transpiration from all the leaves of the forest made it seem as if it is raining up instead of down." "Everything is incredibly wet!" "Our work, trying to understand it all, has hardly even begun." "This is a story that began 400 million years ago." "It's taken all that time to build the tropical rainforest." "Let's imagine that it's 50 years from now." "There's much we've learned already about nature, sometimes using it to suit our ends." "In this we are just part of evolution, no better than the insects and no worse." "But time and evolution gave us conscience." "We can understand what's going on." "We can see the consequence of action." "We can learn why species go extinct." "We have tools and, better we have foresight." "Future - is a time we can change."