Wilderness: Earth鈥檚 last wild places by Russell A. Mittermeier, and others, University of Chicago Press, $75, ISBN 9686397698 Reviewed by Adrian Barnett
CONSERVATION International is justly famous for its application of the hot-spot concept to conservation planning. There is, however, more to the globe than those centres of diversity. Wilderness looks at these other best bits. Defined as areas possessing at least 70 per cent of their original vegetation, covering at least 10,000 square kilometres and with fewer than 5 people per square kilometre, they cover 47 per cent of the planet. There are 37 of them, ranging from Patagonia and the Sahara to the northern boreal forests and Australia鈥檚 Cape York peninsula.
A big-format book for big places, this is also stuffed with magnificent pictures, and some fascinating and fact-filled writing. Statistics are inserted into glorious phrases like informational plums in an inspirational pudding.
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Wilderness is that rare thing: a book that makes you proud to be a citizen of Planet Earth. Well planned and beautifully laid-out, it leavens the statistics of endemism, human population growth and other quantified threats, with empathy-inducing stories of individual species. Bulmer鈥檚 fruit bat, for example, once known only as a fossil, was discovered alive, if not well, in 1975 and hangs on under 鈥渆ndangered鈥� status in just a couple of caves.
If you thought that there was not much left to discover, Wilderness also shows how little we really know: an expedition in 2000 took just 16 days to increase by 30 per cent the known number of frogs in western New Guinea. And if you needed to convince visiting aliens of the value of planet Earth, then this book would be a great place to start. Let鈥檚 just hope it has the same effect on Earth鈥檚 humans.