Ulteriori informazioni
Informationen zum Autor Heather Hansen has worked on staff at Boston magazine, the Sunday Independent (Johannesburg, South Africa) and the Provincetown Banner , where she wrote extensively on people and the environment. She won the Harper's magazine award for Distinguished Magazine Writing in 1999, and has contributed to two books by Gail Sheehy: Middletown, America and Hillary's Choice . Heather has political science and English degrees from Mount Holyoke College and a masters in journalism from UC Berkeley. She lives in Boulder, Colorado. Kimberly Lisagor is a freelance journalist who has written about travel and the environment for Outside , Mother Jones , Men's Journal , National Geographic Adventure , USA Weekend , The New York Times , Los Angeles Times and others. She is the author of Outside's Wilderness Lodge Vacations (W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), which won the Lowell Thomas Award for best guidebook and an Award of Excellence from the North American Travel Journalists Association. She lives in San Luis Obispo, California. Klappentext 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. NORTH AMERICA United States Appalachia Summer was clinging to southern West Virginia halfway through September. It was still warm, but the really stagnant days had passed. There was a breeze, and the hardwood trees along the Coal River's banks had already begun their autumn show. Bill Currey and his buddies were moving their five kayaks slowly downriver on an eight-mile stretch in the Kanawha Valley. Beneath a baby-blue sky they bobbed and weaved through some light white water, occasionally pulling over to fish in some of the deep pools that form behind bedrock boulders. Currey, now with a snowy beard, has been plying the Coal River and its tributaries since his boyhood days in St. Albans, thirteen miles from the capital, Charleston. As president of the Coal River Group, a nonprofit focused on cleaning up and promoting the river, he is so thrilled to unveil his river that he's willing to divulge some of its secrets. But not too many. "That's a great fishing float. On an eight-mile trip we were catching, on any given day, about a fish per mile," he says. They reeled in a smallmouth bass, a walleye, and some Kentucky spotted bass. ("When you catch one, they get up on their tails and dance," says Currey.) "I can't be saying any more about fishing there or my buddies'll shoot me." The Coal is made up of three branches-the Big, Little, and Lower Coal rivers-each stretching more than thirty miles. The Big and Little legs have their headwaters up over three thousand feet in the sandstone ridges of the Coal River, ...
