Amazon Basin

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Dinesh ^club

The nineteenth-century naturalist Thomas Belt may have said it best. In what Darwin called “the best of all natural history journals,” Belt set down what has become the classic image of the tropical forest: a gigantic, teeming expanse, wildly diverse biologically but otherwise undifferentiated. “A ceaseless round of ever-active life weaves the forest scenery of the tropics into the monotonous whole,” as he put it. And single Belt’s day, terms like “Amazonia” and “Amazon Basin” are often used as if they referred to a single, homogenous entity.

This practice irritates professional geographers no end. Strictly speaking, “Amazon basin” refers to the drainage of the Amazon and its tributaries. “Amazonia,” by contrast, refers to the bigger region bounded by the Andes to the west, the Guiana Shielf to the north, and the Brizilian Shield to the south. And neither is conterminous with the “Amazonian rainforest.” To begin with, not all of the Amazonian rainforest” is rainy -- parts of it receive little more precipitation oer year than New York City. On top of that, about a quarter of Amazonia is not forest but savanna -- the Beni, in Bolivia, is the biggest chucn. The river’s foodplain and that of its tributaries take up another 5 to 10 percent of the basin. Only about half of the Amazonia is upland forest -- vines overhead in a tangle like sailing ships rigged by drunks; tree branches in multiple layers, beetles the size of butterflies and butterflies the size of birds -- the ecosystem that people outside the region usually mean when they say “Amazon”> ~ Page 327

2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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