Disappearing Destinations
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Publisher Description
A beautiful and memorable look at some of the most gorgeous endangered places on the planet.
Machu Picchu is a mesmerizing, ancient Incan city tucked away in the mountains of Peru, but it is rapidly being worn down by the thousands of feet treading across its stones. Glacier National Park is a destination long known for the stunning beauty of its ice floes, but in our lifetimes it will have no glaciers due to global warming. In the biobays of Puerto Rico swimmers can float in a sea shimmering with bioluminescent life, but sediment being churned up by development is killing the dinoflagellates that produce the eerie and beautiful glow. And in the Congo Basin of Africa, where great apes roam freely in lush, verdant rainforests, logging is quickly destroying the vast life-giving canopies. These places-along with many others across the globe-are changing as we speak due to global warming, environmental degradation, overuse, and natural causes.
From the Boreal Forests in Finland to the Yangtze River Valley in China, 37 Places to See Before They Disappear is a treasure trove of geographic wonder, and a guide to these threatened destinations and what is being done to save them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The expression "tourist hot spot" takes on new meaning in this fact-packed survey of travel destinations endangered by global warming, environmental degradation, predatory logging, mining and fishing and the impact of too many tourists. In 37 essays, travel journalists Lisagor and Hansen vividly document places in peril, ranging from the ocean nations of Tuvalu and the Maldives, slowly submerging beneath rising waters, to the historic ski chalets of the Alps, where snow is falling less and melting faster. The catalogue of disasters is chilling: the glaciers are vanishing from America's Glacier National Park; the ancient city of Timbuktu in central Mali is succumbing to desertification; warming seas are bleaching Australia's Great Barrier Reef; dry winters and inept water management have drained life from the Rio Grande; and the relentless march of hundreds of thousands of enthralled tourists is causing irrevocable damage to the ancient Incan city of Machu Picchu. The authors' accounts of how the world's beauty is being despoiled, based on sharp on-site reporting, are a cautionary call to arms for tourists to fight environmental excesses and, when traveling, to tread lightly.