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  September 6, 2004


dymaxion2An award-winning PBS documentariy series, The Living Edens, portrayed several of the last remaining places on Earth of extraordinary natural beauty. Many of the most populated areas of our planet were once places of extraordinary beauty, but they have been so degraded by intensive human development that this beauty has been lost. Europe and the populated areas of the rest of the world have no Living Edens left. Of North America's four, two are national parks and two are in the Arctic. All of them are threatened, and many, perhaps all, will be developed in this century as the insatiable thirst of humanity for more living space and resources transforms the planet inexorably into homogeneous urban subdivisions and desert. These soon-to-be-lost Living Edens are:
  1. Anamala/Kerala (S.Asia)
  2. Borneo
  3. Bhutan
  4. Canyonlands (US)
  5. Denali (Alaska)
  6. Etosha (S.Africa)
  7. Glacier Bay (Alaska)
  8. Kakadu (N.Australia)
  9. Kamchatka (Siberia)
  10. Madagascar
  11. Manu (Amazon)
  12. Namibia
  13. Ngorongoro (E.Africa)
  14. Palau (Micronesia)
  15. Patagonia (S.America)
  16. S.Georgia Isl. (S.Atlantic)
  17. Thailand
  18. Yellowstone (US)
What would you add to the list? An Eden has to be an area large enough to have a self-sustaining, balanced ecosystem (i.e. relatively wild), and of course, it has to be beautiful, though beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I've never visited any of the 18 Edens on PBS's list. The most beautiful place I've ever been is the temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island, BC, but it has been largely destroyed by logging. The next most beautiful place I've ever been is the Island of Mustique in the Grenadine Islands of the Caribbean, but it's far from wilderness -- the only reason it looks relatively natural is that only multi-millionaires live there, so there are only a few (large) homes on large tracts of land well spaced out. So far they haven't ruined the beaches.

The challenge, it seems to me, is to expose people to this astonishing beauty before we destroy it, but not let the crowds and the commercial exploitation of tourists destroy it in the very process of showing people what we have to lose.
elves chasm

Photo of Elves Chasm, Grand Canyon by Danish photographer Hans Nyberg.

12:53:28 PM  trackback []  comment []


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