»Josef Reichholf manages to achieve an almost forgotten art: capturing the beauty of the world in the beauty of a book.« Katja Oskamp

»Magnificent academic prose.« Denis Scheck

»Joseph Reichholf is a storyteller and a biologist. He paints a picture (...). Unlike other scientists, he’s not afraid to include his own personal experiences or those of friends.« MDR Kultur

»The book shows us the beauty of the forests and how we can save them.« Elle

»In this wonderfully designed book, zoologist Josef H. Reichholf and illustrator Johann Brandstetter highlight the diverse beauty of the rainforests: the formidable giant trees, the small birds suckling on blossoms, and the sloth that slowly moves through the treetops.« Deutschlandfunk Kultur

★Rights Sold: Simplified Chinese, Complex Chinese
★With illustrations and maps by award-winning illustrator Johann Brandstetter
★A book that provides a sensory experience of the wonders of our declining planet

Why are tropical rainforests still dwindling even though we have long known how important they are for our planet’s climate and biodiversity? This great new book by best-selling author Josef H. Reichholf provides the answers. It invites us to rediscover the green tropics of our blue planet – before its magnificence and diversity are lost forever. Johann Brandstetter’s opulent diagrams bring us grippingly close to a fading world. We come to understand how the tropics could yield such splendid nature with tiny hummingbirds and magnificent orchids, but also how the Western world is destroying the rainforests – and how this destruction can still be stopped.

Josef H. Reichholf
born in 1945, was director of the vertebrate section of the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology and professor for Ecology and Nature Conservation at the Technical University of Munich. In 2007, he was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize for Academic Prose. In 2010, his bestseller Raven Black Intelligence received the Austrian prize for Academic Book of the Year. His latest work The Life of Squirrels (2019) was published by Hanser Verlag.

Johann Brandstetter
born in 1959, started out as a conservator and later switched to the field of illustration. He has illustrated close to 200 books, and his works have won multiple awards. Study trips to Central Africa, Asia and Central America inspired his Symbioses, a series of pictures that was exhibited in Salzburg in 2016/17 and was awarded the prize for Academic Book of the Year.

Preliminary note – Amazonia is burning
Introduction – The Green Belt

Part I: Tropical Diversity
Part II: Why the rainforests are getting lost and what consequences this will have
Part III: Conservation of the tropical forests

Because we need the Rainforests – Drawing a balance