Rima: A Retelling of Green Mansions for the 21st Century

Stan Rice is better known for his nonfiction works (see his website,) about evolution and science, but he has also published fiction, which I have reviewed previously in this blog. He has just published another novel, Rima: Green Mansions for the 21^st century.

 

I think we all realize (at least, all of us who have read Green Mansions by W. H. Hudson, published in the early 20^th century) that a new version of this story was needed. There are two main reasons.

The first is that the original Green Mansions was racist. Hudson, like H. Rider Haggard (She) and James Hilton (Lost Horizon), assumed that any advanced culture had to be at least the remnant of a white civilization: for Hudson, in the Amazon; for Haggard, in Africa; and for Hilton, the Himalayas. Rice, in retelling Green Mansions, has dispensed with civilization altogether: in Rima, the forces of nature itself (personified in the not-quite-human Rima) are intelligent, in a way. The protagonists are a male scientist from Ecuador, and the female scientist Rima from Peru.

Second, the topic has now become urgent. When Hudson first wrote Green Mansions, the rainforest seemed infinite; now, it is in danger of total destruction.

There is another thing that has become urgent. Many of us understand Donald Trump’s disapproval of illegal immigrants. But Trump also cancelled the visas of international graduate students who were in America legally, which was the case for the two protagonists in this book. (This really happened.) But it seemed impossible that Trump would actually try to bring rain forest ecological research to an end. But in 2026, Trump fired—without notice—the entire advisory board of the National Science Foundation. This has brought an immediate end to ecological research, particularly rain forest ecology research. In current reality, then, Trump is even more evil than Rice depicts him in the novel. When I was in graduate school, every graduate student aspired to be part of, and someday have her/his own, NSF grant. Those days are completely over. NSF once stood for National Science Foundation; now it stands for non-sufficient funds. Though published just this year, Rice’s novel is already out of date. A little.

This novel was not an easy job for Rice to pull off. He must have extensive and intimate knowledge of his subject matter, as indicated by the author’s notes at the end of the book. The author has a graduate-school level of knowledge about rain forest science, although he indicates he has only briefly visited a rain forest (including the Jatún Sacha research station about which he writes), as well as the Andean highlands. He also knows a lot about pre-Columbian civilizations. He knows about real and important people in environmental issues, such as Wes Jackson, Wangari Maathai, and Dan Janzen. Even some of his minor incidents (such as when activist Thomas Brail camped in a sycamore tree in Paris, and was visited by actress Juliette Binoche), really happened.

You will enjoy reading Rima. It has some really funny scenes in it, such as when the monkeys get together to destroy a construction site. But the book is also dead serious. If you want to laugh, and to care, this is worth your novel-reading time.

The Importance of Urban Trees

 

I have always (even when I was a child) been inspired by trees out in the forest, especially the giant sequoia trees in the Sierra Nevada mountains near the town where I grew up. In contrast, urban trees seemed much less important, especially since many of them are horticulturally altered versions of tree species that are not native to the area. Urban parks and woodlots offer shade and peace in cities, but compared to the canyonlike buildings around them, they seem to be of little importance. A park cannot compare with the grandeur of a forest.

I just finished reading a book by Thomas Brail, The Man who Saved the Trees (L’Homme qui sauvait les arbres; Arthaud 2022). He became alarmed at the many thousands of trees (mostly planes, which we call sycamores) that were being chopped down in cities all across France. He is an expert tree climber, part of his work as an arborist. He climbed into a sycamore tree in Paris, right across from the office of the Ministry of Ecological Transition, which was one of many trees slated to be cut down. (Can you imagine such a department in American government?) He stayed there for 28 days, until the Ministry decided to reconsider whether to save the trees. He admitted that, sometimes, it is necessary to cut down a tree, but many urban trees were being cut down to widen sidewalks and make them sunny. But during hot weather, direct sun is not something you want. And the trees provided many other ecological services to the city and its people and its ecosystems.

Brail correctly gambled that no government agency would cut down a tree that had someone in it; and there would be no point in cutting down the other trees, since the one remaining tree would be in the way of “development.” What he did not count on was how many supporters he got, from social media and from news coverage: sometimes sixty people would gather under his tree, and there were thousands of supporters around France. He even got a visit from the most famous French actress, Juliette Binoche.

But why urban trees? Is it not more important to save forests? Many oak and beech woodlands are still being cut down to make way for conifer plantations. This is what I thought until I put myself inside the mind of Thomas Brail.

It is true that a forest is more ecologically significant than a park. But on a tree-by-tree basis, the urban forest (the park) is more important. Urban trees provide benefits otherwise almost absent from the cities, and offer them directly to more people. It is not just how much oxygen they produce, or how much carbon dioxide they absorb, but where they are doing it. Having one less tree in a forest might not have as much impact as having one less tree shading a sidewalk.

And urban trees keep the natural world squarely in the field of attention of people who might not otherwise give a thought to the natural world. My thought is that urban trees are the missionaries of the tree world into the artificial human world.

Thomas Brail does not live in trees anymore. Nor does he say you have to. What he does and wants you to do is to eat less processed food, and more food from a garden; and to get rid of television, while instead looking for inspiration in the world of Nature. Perhaps most importantly in his work, he remains calm in the face of confrontation. He wants the forces of destruction to be the ones to get angry, thus making them seem to be stupid (ils ont l’air idiot).