Indonesia's expanding logging industry is decimating the lowland rainforests of Sumatra and Borneo (shown above). The lavishly illustrated Archipelago: The Islands of Indonesia, From the Nineteenth-Century Discoveries of Alfred Russel Wallace to the Fate of Forests and Reefs in the Twenty-First Century by Gavan Daws and Marty Fujita (University of California Press, $45, £27.50) describes the 14,000-mile journey made by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace among these islands — it was while on the archipelago that, independently of Charles Darwin, Wallace developed a theory of evolution by natural selection. The book's final chapter looks at twentieth-century Indonesia and the ravages to biodiversity that have been wrought by the country's economic imperatives.