The Fruit Book

that tells the local people how to get a good return on their trees without succumbing to the lure of a quick buck from a logging company. It has proved a big success. B The book is called Fruit Trees and Useful Plants in the Lives of Amazonians, but is better known simply as the "fruit book". The second edition was produced at the request of politicians in western Amazonia. Its blend of hard science and local knowledge on the use and trade of 35 native forest species has been so well received (and well used) that no less a dignitary than Brazil's environment minister, Marina Silva, has written the foreword. "There is nothing else like the Shanley book," says Adalberto Verrísimo, director of the Institute of People and the Environment of the Amazon. "It gives science back to the poor, to the people who really need it." C Shanley's work on the book began a decade ago, with a plea for help from the Rural Workers' Union of Paragominas, a Brazilian town whose prosperity is based on exploitation of timber. The union realised that logging companies would soon be knocking on the doors of the caboclos, peasant farmers living on the Rio Capim, an Amazon tributary in the Brazilian state of Pará. Isolated and illiterate, the…