Topic: jungle

A jungle is land covered with dense forest and tangled vegetation, usually in tropical climates.
Application of the term has varied greatly during the past recent century.

Etymology
The word jungle originates from the Sanskrit word jaṅgala (Sanskrit: जङ्गल), meaning rough
and arid. It came into the English language via Hindi in the 18th century.Jāṅgala has also been
variously transcribed in English as jangal, jangla, jungal, and juṅgala.

Although the Sanskrit word refers to dry land, it has been suggested that an Anglo-Indian
interpretation led to its connotation as a dense "tangled thicket" while others have argued that a
cognate word in Urdu derived from Persian ‫( جنگل‬Jangal), did refer to forests. The term is
prevalent in many languages of the Indian subcontinent, and the Iranian Plateau, where it is
commonly used to refer to the plant growth replacing primeval forest or to the unkempt tropical
vegetation that takes over abandoned areas.

History
The jungle is the richest habitat on Earth. Over the intervals of time, different parts of tropical
areas have provided a variety of flora and fauna, together with newer species discovered
annually. Tropical jungles have been the home to indigenous peoples, who have shaped
traditional cultures and civilizations based on the environment.

Wildlife
Because jungles occur on all inhabited landmasses and may incorporate numerous vegetation and
land types in different climatic zones, the wildlife of jungles cannot be straightforwardly defined.

Varying usage
As dense and tangled vegetation

One of the most common meanings of jungle is land overgrown with tangled vegetation at
ground level, especially in the tropics. Typically such vegetation is sufficiently dense to hinder
movement by humans, requiring that travellers cut their way through. This definition draws a
distinction between rainforest and jungle, since the understorey of rainforests is typically open of
vegetation due to a lack of sunlight, and hence relatively easy to traverse. Jungles may exist
within, or at the borders of, tropical forests in areas where the woodland has been opened
through natural disturbance such as hurricanes, or through human activity such as logging. The
successional vegetation that springs up following such disturbance, is dense and tangled and is a
"typical" jungle. Jungle also typically forms along rainforest margins such as stream banks, once
again due to the greater available light at ground level.Monsoon forests and mangroves are
commonly referred to as jungles of this type. Having a more open canopy than rainforests,
monsoon forests typically have dense understoreys with numerous lianas and shrubs making
movement difficult, while the prop roots and low canopies of mangroves produce similar
difficulties.

As moist forest

Because European explorers initially travelled through tropical forests largely by river, the dense
tangled vegetation lining the stream banks gave a misleading impression that such jungle
conditions existed throughout the entire forest. As a result, it was wrongly assumed that the
entire forest was impenetrable jungle. This in turn appears to have given rise to the second
popular usage of jungle as virtually any humid tropical forest. Jungle in this context is
particularly associated with tropical rain forest, but may extend to cloud forest, temperate
rainforest, and mangroves with no reference to the vegetation structure or the ease of travel.

The terms "tropical forest" and "rainforest" have largely replaced "jungle" as the descriptor of
humid tropical forests, a linguistic transition that has occurred since the 1970s. "Rainforest" itself
did not appear in English dictionaries prior to the 1970s. The word "jungle" accounted for over
80% of the terms used to refer to tropical forests in print media prior to the 1970s; since then it
has been steadily replaced by "rainforest", although "jungle" still remains in common use when
referring to tropical rainforests.

As metaphor

As a metaphor, jungle often refers to situations that are unruly or lawless, or where the only law
is perceived to be "survival of the fittest". This reflects the view of "city people" that forests are
such places. Upton Sinclair gave the title The Jungle (1906) to his famous book about the life of
workers at the Chicago Stockyards, portraying the workers as being mercilessly exploited with
no legal or other lawful recourse.The term "The Law of the Jungle" is also used in a similar
context, drawn from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book (1894)—though in the society of jungle
animals portrayed in that book and obviously meant as a metaphor for human society, that phrase
referred to an intricate code of laws which Kipling describes in detail, and not at all to a lawless
chaos.

The word "jungle" itself carries connotations of untamed and uncontrollable nature and isolation
from civilisation, along with the emotions that evokes: threat, confusion, powerlessness,
disorientation and immobilisation. The change from "jungle" to "rainforest" as the preferred term
for describing tropical forests has been a response to an increasing perception of these forests as
fragile and spiritual places, a viewpoint not in keeping with the darker connotations of
"jungle".Cultural scholars, especially post-colonial critics, often analyse the jungle within the
concept of hierarchical domination and the demand western cultures often places on other
cultures to conform to their standards of civilisation. For example: Edward Said notes that the
Tarzan depicted by Johnny Weissmuller was a resident of the jungle representing the savage,
untamed and wild, yet still a white master of it; and in his essay "An Image of Africa" about
Heart of Darkness Nigerian novelist and theorist Chinua Achebe notes how the jungle and Africa
become the source of temptation for white European characters like Marlowe and Kurtz.Former
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak compared Israel to "a villa in the jungle", a comparison which
had been often quoted in Israeli political debates. Barak's critics on the left side of Israeli politics
strongly criticised the comparison. For example, Uri Avnery charged that comparing "civilised"
Israel with "a villa" and Israel's Arab neighbors with the "wild beasts" of the "jungle" tends to
throw the blame for the absence of peace on the "wild" Arab and Palestinian side, and absolve
Israel of responsibility.

See also
Monsoon forest

Arid Forest Research Institute (AFRI)

Rainforest

Wilderness

Grove (nature)

Amazon rainforest

References
External links
BBC - Science and Nature: Jungle -

Link illustrating Biomes -