In this timely book a brilliant photographer and an outstanding scholar have come together to create a valuable and necessary insight into the most lovely and the most endangered environments on earth. Art Wolfe has travelled to these tropical rainforests, home to half of the world's living species, in search of their secrets. From the vertiginous depth of an Amazon treescape to the minute detail of a poisonous dart frog, he has communicated the life of the rainforest in photographs both intimate and emotionally charged. Sir Ghillean Prance, a naturalist of world renown, writes compellingly of the different ecological workings of the rainforests and of the urgent need to give spiritual value to the processes of caring for the natural world. Together photographs and text bear witness to the resplendence and terrifying fragility of the world's rainforests as the twenty first century begins.