The Last Wild Places of the Earth

In 1996, The National Geographic published a beautiful coffee-table book, the Last wild Places, about the "last wild places" worldwide. I had to get it and I did not, from the National Geographic but, since it it is out of print, at a ridiculous price from a remainder bookseller. I wanted it badly because it fired my imagination and I was not disappointed. Indeed, it is wonderful both in text and pictures, but mostly because it gives us a fresh and exciting look at the idea of wilderness. First, it is global not just North American or even of U.S. Second, because it involves not just our favorite mountain and forest scenery but desserts, polar regions, and wetlands, areas which, for good reason, have escaped significant human intervention. Yes, wilderness also includes the abandoned, and even the nastiest places of the earth.

I liked it because of the opening paragraph of the "Forward" by Patrick F. Noonan, now President of Conservation International:

I've long believed in the John Muir maxim, "The clearest way into the Universe is through the wilderness." His statement takes on more weight now because that wild door to the universe has been slowly closing since he called it to our attention at the turn of the century. Ours may be the last generation with the opportunity to insure that wild places will always beckon to humankind, offering us a way to better understand our role in the cosmos.

My only exception is the use of the word "Last." However true, it has a plaintive mood we ought to overcome in favor of something more positive and dynamic. Perhaps it is distinctly American because of what we have done to our continent and should not apply to the rest of the world. Take Africa for instance.

From the depths of the Sahara to the tropical rainforest of the Congo Basin, from the vast savannas of the Sahel to the west to the famous East African game savannas such as the Serengeti, from the wetlands on the Mediterranean and deserts of the Sahara, to the national parks of South Africa, Africa has the greatest and most varied wilderness areas in the world.

Africa has been an integral part of the western imagination. with Tarzan, Dr. Livingston, Joseph Conrad, the Foreign Legion, the slave trade, the pyramids of the Nile, giraffes, lions, gorillas, wildebeast, a wealth of wildlife, diamonds and oil, coconuts and cocoa nuts, colonial adventures and wars, political independence and more wars, the anthropological homeland of the human race, it would be impossible to imagine the world without Africa.

But we are now overlaying the legendary Africa with new images of political chaos, vicious civil wars, disease, rocketing population, grinding poverty and starvation, wars, and corruption. Not a pretty picture, which distorts our more romantic visions of the beautiful and abundant Africa of the past.

Yet, behind the human suffering, much of the legendary old Africa remains. Africa has a huge wilderness endowment. According to the Sierra Club, ICUN world wilderness inventory (1987), Africa has 9,179,662 km2 of wilderness of which 877,902 km2 are under protection, most of it south of the Sahara. This is 338,870 square miles, which compares to a US state and federal total of a certified 164,200 square miles of protected wilderness (with 50 percent in Alaska).

And behind that are inexorable threats to that wilderness by double-digit population growth rates, wars, poverty, neglect and exploitation, which defy description, a wilderness holocaust about to happen.