The Ragged Edge of the World
Encounters at the Frontier Where Modernity, Wildlands and Indigenous Peoples Meet
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4.3 • 4 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A pioneering work of environmental journalism that vividly depicts the people, animals and landscapes on the front lines of change's inexorable march.
A species nearing extinction, a tribe losing centuries of knowledge, a tract of forest facing the first incursion of humans-how can we even begin to assess the cost of losing so much of our natural and cultural legacy?
For forty years, environmental journalist and author Eugene Linden has traveled to the very sites where tradition, wildlands and the various forces of modernity collide. In The Ragged Edge of the World, he takes us from pygmy forests to the Antarctic to the world's most pristine rainforest in the Congo to tell the story of the harm taking place-and the successful preservation efforts-in the world's last wild places.
The Ragged Edge of the World is a critical favorite, and was an editors' pick on Oprah.com.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mingling memoir with reportage, Linden (The Winds of Change), a veteran environmental correspondent to National Geographic and the New York Times, offers profound if desultory observations on civilization's encroachment on ecosystems and their indigenous populations from the Arctic to Borneo. Linden's preoccupations are philosophical as well as pragmatic: how can New Guineans maintain their traditional culture while accepting valuable aspects of modernization? what does chimpanzees' use of sticks as weapons tell us about humanity and our intrinsic nature? Some of the essays are affectionate albeit meandering reminiscences, such as a fond recollection of a trip to Cuba's pristine Alejandro de Humboldt National Park, one of the "very few timeless' places left on the planet." Linden writes that in these vignettes "lie truths beyond statistics and theory," but their rambling structure frequently makes their significance hard to fathom. Linden does pull the various strands together in a final commentary on the overwhelming stress on species and ecosystems and an introduction to his own proposal for an affordable, self-policing, and in his opinion, achievable continental-scale conservation plan.
