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Now this is the Law of the Jungle
as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper
but the Wolf that shall break it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk
the Law runneth forward and back
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf
and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

That’s Rudyard Kipling.

Environmentalists have changed the use of the word jungle. Even the OED notes the similarity in sound between the words jungle and tangle and we often use jungle to mean an almost impenetrable tangle of some sort. The concrete jungle is a phrase used to convey a sense of a threatening place that is confusing and wild at times.

That’s the same reason that Kipling’s jungle comes across as a dangerous place.

Break the law of the jungle and you die.

A tropical jungle, full of snakes and parrots and vines is now called, instead, a rainforest.  Its value is justly recognized by this name change since jungle denotes something that is more than we can deal with, and so is kind of useless to us.

The word jungle comes to English from Hindi, but in some senses there, and even more so earlier in Sanskrit, it didn’t so much denote a lush rainforest, but a dry desert.

So in jungle this sense of useless land is retained, although the amount of water, wildlife and leafy overhead cover is reversed.

Jungle has only been part of English for a couple of hundred years, since the times when England was building her Empire and began taking on such words from the lands she claimed as hers.