Description:
Drawing a case study from the Pacific Northwest, where he makes his home, noted environmental journalist Richard Manning argues that long-practiced conservation strategies are not enough to protect wild lands, and that little can come from calling for more wilderness preservation when the lands beyond the wilderness are so ill used. "The fundamental problem," he writes, "is in the scale and nature of human development; rethinking our definition of wilderness seems an academic exercise in the face of real pollution, sprawl, mindlessness, and greed." That development, he continues, involves imposing an industrial model on the world's ecosystems, so that, in the case of the Northwest, rivers have been seen as factories that make fish and electricity, forests as factories that make timber, and mountains as factories that make ore. That model is not only incorrect, he says, but also dangerously misguided. In a journalistic tour of the region, Manning makes a convincing argument for removing dams on sensitive waterways; looks into the alarmingly high hidden costs of salmon and shrimp farming; condemns the suburbanization of the mountain West in the face of "white flight" from California; and looks into the lumbering practice called clear-cutting, which, though pioneered in the 1950s (by the U.S. Forest Service), was not put into general practice until the late 1970s. Manning's notions that it is possible to foster an economy of "conservation-based development" and that "wilderness has outlived its usefulness" will doubtless provoke controversy in green circles, while his call to reduce consumption and treat habitats of all kinds with more care won't play well in certain boardrooms--all of which means that, in his role as gadfly, Manning has done his job. --Gregory McNamee
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