Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Help Save Them (Vintage...

Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Help Save Them (Vintage Departures ... | Kimberly Lisagor, Heather Hansen | Places to See Before They Die

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Disappearing Desti...

	Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Help Save Them (Vintage Departures ... Kimberly Lisagor, Heather Hansen Vintage, 2008 - 400 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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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.

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A Pragmatic Call for Responsible Tourism

Disappearing Destinations is a timely book about the impact of our actions on the places that we love. Through profiles of 37 iconic travel destinations--like the Florida Everglades, the island of Oahu, Yellowstone National Park, the Amazon Basin, Machu Picchu, the Canary Islands, the Congo Basin, and the Yangtze River--Lisagor and Hansen show us that they are in peril. But they can also be preserved for future generations with some smart, pragmatic efforts.

Each profile starts with a seductive description of the place, reminding us how much pleasure we associate with it. But just as you're about to book your ticket--to Napa, Lapland, Venice, Patagonia, or Alaska--the writers hint that these wonderful places are under threat. They quote experts who explain the impact that humans are causing (often incidentally) to the place through industry, development, pollution, tourism, etc. In some cases, like the mountain-top mining in the Appalachians, the scene is almost apocalyptic. But in every case, it is deeply troubling. (And you won't find it mentioned in the tourist brochures!)

Then locals testify to their own loss of heritage through the degradation of the place. Their input shows that these issues not only impact "we" travelers, but also the local population that has a historical, cultural, and spiritual relationship to the area. It's poignant stuff. And after a few pages of each profile, you start to feel a real connection to the place. You feel pained for it and the community.

But just before you're about to give up traveling altogether, Lisagor & Hansen provide local counter-examples showing that these problems are not irreversible. They detail efforts being made by environmental agents, community activists, and responsible tourism outfits to preserve and enrich these locales. Much of their actions are having a positive impact, sometimes even reversing the threat of decline. Furthermore, the writers show how travelers can continue to enjoy these places too, but in a responsible manner.

The message of the book is that we are unintentionally destroying many of the places that we love through short-sighted tourism practices, aggressive industrial expansion, and rampant over-development. The authors elegantly combine travel-writing, activism, and analysis that engages one's mind and emotions on a totally different level. A much higher level.

Most importantly, Disappearing Destinations actually makes you want to travel: to kayak the Coal River, to hike Kilimanjaro, to explore Timbuktu, to float on the Dead Sea, and to trek through Nepal. But it makes you want to do so responsibly, in a way that contributes to those places (environmentally) as much as is taken away (emotionally and spiritually).

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Places to See Before They Die

This book serves as both an introductory travelogue to locations of interest for eco-tourists, and as a warning about what we're doing to our planet. Lisagor and Hansen introduce 37 threatened areas around the world, with some usual suspects like ANWR, the Amazon basin, and the Great Barrier Reef; but also some surprises like Lapland, southern West Virginia, and the Danube delta in Romania and Ukraine. Most of these pristine locations are threatened by either climate change or unregulated development; or rampant tourism in a few cases like Machu Picchu or Mount Everest.

The adventurous or caring reader will surely feel the urge to visit these incredible destinations before they're gone. But the structure of this book leaves a little something to be desired. The 37 locations of interest are covered in fairly brief chapters that resemble feature articles, and the structure is nearly always the same - describe the beauty of the location, discuss the threats faced by the ecosystem, provide coverage for local activists and organizers, and wrap things up with a closing paragraph on what the reader is missing. (The latter is often accomplished with forced and awkward prose like "a rainbow from a passing shower lingers" or "the range curves along the landscape and into the future.")

While the locations covered here definitely deserve the attention, the book feels a little arbitrary and perfunctory, like a collection of magazine articles with an identical structure applied to selected settings. And after learning about how each location is facing the same threats, there is potential for a higher theme that doesn't quite arrive for the reader. (For instance, we know climate change is a threat, but a bigger-picture treatment of this disaster might be more insightful for globally-focused environmentalists than repetitive prose about three dozen local problems.) Granted, as a travelogue the book is still intriguing and rewarding, and the appendix brings deserved attention to many brave and noteworthy conservation organizations. [~doomsdayer520~]

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