Islands of green. That’s what’s left. We’re doing such a number on our precious home planet, plowing, paving, overpopulating, that areas “untouched”—are there any?--become shrinking islands in the vast sea of human enterprise.
I’ve witnessed the carnage up close. Driven logging roads through miles of barren clear-cuts to find a put-in place for a “wilderness” canoe trip in boreal forests of northern Ontario. Passed endless palm oil plantations to reach remnant scraps of woods in Borneo, hoping to find pittas, parrots, hornbills and wood pigeons with space enough to live there. Smelled smoke from slash-and-burn farming and seen cornstalks sprouting among charred stumps of what a month before had been virgin forest in a “protected” national park on Sulawesi. But everyone has to make a living, yes?
Something I’ve learned in my almost four-scour years here is that the one sure way of “saving” a patch of habitat is to buy it. I couldn’t stop the logger from cutting sixty-six old-growth white pines in a favourite bird-migration stop-off during three dreadful days in 1983; the earth shook every fifteen minutes as another giant fell. But from that tragedy a phoenix rose—a fierce commitment in many people’s hearts to purchase, restore and protect forever what was left. I was one of them.
“Open land” is always up for grabs in people’s minds, resources “going to waste” when they could be put to good use making a living, a buck or a fortune. Thankfully, there are caring people all over the world banding together to save bits and pieces of precious habitat, restore and replant degraded areas and create wildlife corridors to reconnect remaining “islands.” Producing lots of jobs in local communities in the process, for guiding, guarding, researching, and promoting ecotourism.
I want to support so many, and a portion of all paid subscriptions to Good News from the Great Outdoors will help me do so. Current favourites of mine: Fundacion Jocotoco in Ecuador, and the Ancient Forest Alliance in B.C. Check ‘em out!
Jacques Cousteau wrote the incredibly moving foreword to Islands at the Edge, a powerful, beautiful book published by Douglas & McIntyre in 1984 in an effort to save the Queen Charlottes from logging. “Planet and life are one, and our mother, the Earth, cries out to us: the harm that you have inflicted upon the humblest of my islands, it is upon me, the whole Earth…” Should be required reading for everyone in the world. See if you can get through it without crying.