Nafanua : saving the Samoan rain forest
Prompted by his mother's death from breast cancer, ethnobotanist Paul Alan Cox traveled with his family to a remote Samoan village at the edge of a rain forest to search for new leads in treating the disease. There he discovers a promising new plant-derived drug, prostratin. The promise of a new drug lead was soon overshadowed by news that a logging company had started to destroy the 30,000 acre rain forest where Cox first collected the plant that yielded prostratin. It was then that the village elders started to instruct Cox in the legends of Nafanua, the Samoan goddess who in ancient times freed the people from oppression and taught them to protect the rain forest. Collaborating with the village elders Cox launched an international campaign to stop the logging of the Falealupo Rain Forest
Print Book, English, ©1997
W.H. Freeman, New York, ©1997