BOOKS, NATURALLY
Wilderness: Earth’s Last Wild Places
Russell A. Mittermeier, Cristina Goettsch
Mittermeier, Patricio Robles Gil, John Pilgrim, Gustavo
Fonseca, Thomas Brooks, and William R. Konstant. 2003.
Conservation International, Washington, D.C. 576 pp.,
490 color photographs, clothbound. $75.
In a gorgeous book replete with stunning photographs
of tribal people, wildlife, and wild lands, I kept returning
to one: a haunting image of dunes in the Namib Desert
that stretch into the distance seemingly without end.
In the shadowy foreground, the sand is russet-colored
but in the background it glows like hot coals in the
sun. The only visible sign of life is a lone gemsbok
trudging through the sand. It too is russet-colored,
set off from the sand only by its long, backwardpointing
horns and patch of white on its face, rump, and legs.
This gemsbok clearly belongs to this harsh landscape,
which otherwise appears to be a vast lifeless wasteland.
But lonely as this gemsbok looks, he is surrounded by
living things: 1,200 species of vascular plants, 262
birds, 67 other mammals, and nearly 100 reptiles and
amphibians.
Wasteland is a standard dictionary definition of wilderness, and it’s easy to see how people could gaze into such a desert and see nothing of use or value; any land not amenable to agriculture was deemed wasted. While that view prevails among some people in some places, more and more people around the world are beginning to recognize the immense value of wilderness, places not seen as wasted but rather as places not to waste. Wilderness: Earth’s Last Wild Places shows us why.
Away, away, from
men and towns,
To the wild wood and the downs,
To the silent wilderness,
Where the soul need not repress
Its music.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley
Wilderness is part science, part art. The word wilderness not only means different things to different people, it has been defined by many governments as well, although government definitions, including that in the U.S. Wilderness Act, may be as subjective as any one person’s. Scientists at Conservation International (CI), who prepared this volume, first undertook to agree on objective criteria to select the wildernesses to be included. To qualify, an area must have 70 percent of its original vegetation intact, cover at least 10,000 square kilometers (3,861 square miles), and contain fewer than five people per square kilometer. Using these criteria, 31 areas were identified as wilderness. Among these are such obvious selections as Amazonia, Central Africa’s Congo forests, and New Guinea, whose rainforests boast levels of biodiversity that dwarf those of other habitats. More surprising is the number of deserts—11 in all, including the Mojave, Sonora/Baja, Chihuahuan, and Colorado Plateau in or partly in the United States.
Six more areas did not meet one or two of the three criteria but were included for special reasons. The Appalachians and European mountains, for instance, meet only the size criterion but “. . . are symbolically very important as wilderness enclaves in the eastern U.S. and Europe, and have tremendous recreational, aesthetic, and spiritual value to these highly developed areas.”
Each of the 37 wildernesses is described in a separate chapter, with an introduction on the area’s history and sections on the area’s biodiversity, flagship species, human cultures, threats, and conservation. Taken together, they provide an exceptional overview of the natural world and our place in it. And the photographs are breathtaking, each one illuminating something essential about these special wild places and their inhabitants.
The most striking revelation of the book is the amount of wilderness left. These 37 areas are inhabited by a mere 2.4 percent of the human population but represent 46 percent of the Earth’s land surface! What’s more, collectively these areas form 84 percent of the original extent of wilderness, so the shrinkage has been relatively small. On the downside, however, only seven percent of the total wilderness area is under some form of protection. Now is the time to act to protect much more. As the authors argue, “If these wilderness areas occupy more than half of Earth’s l a n d surface, yet have only about 2.4% of its human population, it should be possible to maintain them largely intact without deprivation to global society.”
Indeed, saving these areas can only benefit global society, for reasons detailed in the text that range from their being storehouses of biodiversity and providing ecosystem services such pollination and watershed protection to their value as sources of sustainable economic development and places where tribal people can continue to live traditional lifestyles. It is the photographs in this book, however, that make the most persuasive argument for protecting wilderness. These places, whether forests, savannas, deserts, or mountains, are irreplaceably beautiful, with the power to inspire grand dreams and flights of the imagination as nothing else can.
—Susan Lumpkin
ZooGoer 32(3)
2003. Copyright 2003 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
