It’s Never Too Late
SECTION 6: Healing Earth’s Scars
Because of human overpopulation and the destruction of the environment—either through the desperation of poverty or through the thoughtless, selfish overconsumption of the elite—many animal and plant species are losing out. Throughout these pages, we have shared stories of animals rescued from the brink of extinction but still endangered by lack of suitable Read More
On August 19, 2006, I stood on the shore of Lake Onondaga near Syracuse, New York. The lake is a sacred place for the Onondaga Nation—it was once beautiful, now a Superfund site. Opposite us was a barren wasteland, the wetlands and meadows converted to a dump for the toxic by-products of industry. Author Read More
These two stories have much in common. In both cases, people were living in environments that had been completely destroyed. Sudbury’s environment, at one time, was reduced to a landscape similar to the surface of the moon; the people of the Loess Plateau were living in an area so desolate that they had given Read More
When I visited Sudbury, in Ontario, Canada, for the first time in the mid-1990s, I had gone to give a lecture at the university—and while I was there I heard a fantastic story. A story of destruction and renewal that so inspired me that I returned, several years later, to learn more about this Read More
It was the people of Sudbury who got together to do something about their terrible, polluted environment. It was the government in China, with support of the World Bank, that organized the people of the Loess Plateau to change things. My friend John Liu, in Beijing, has talked to me for hours about this Read More
Stephen Young and a gathering of the first dozen groups who received micro-grants (credit: Stephen Young).
These two projects were initiated by NGOs with the specific purpose Read More
When, in 1960, I arrived at Gombe National Park to study the chimpanzees there, lush forest stretched for miles along the eastern shores of Lake Tanganyika and inland as far as the eye could see. Gradually, over the years, growing populations of local people swollen by refugees, struggling to eke out an existence, cut Read More
This restoration project was initiated with the specific purpose of benefiting wildlife—the migratory birds and their wetlands habitat in China. To me, it illustrates the need to improve the lives of the local people in order to protect nature.
The Cao Hai Nature Reserve in China’s southwestern Guizhou Province is a wetland area with a Read More
To me, the next two stories are among the most inspiring in this section—for they illustrate what can be accomplished by one person working, against all odds, to heal utterly devastated environments. True, in the first of them, the one person—Rene Haller—was a qualified horticulturist and hired to do the job. But he, and Read More
This is the tale of the ecological transformation of a five-hundred-acre “wasteland” created by twenty years of quarrying for the underlying corral limestone and shale on the Kenya coast, not far from Mombasa. This land had been quarried by a cement company to within less than an inch of the brackish water below and Read More
This story is about the absurd dream of a six-year-old boy that eventually came true. There was no fairy godmother waving a magic wand. Only sheer determination to see his childish vision become reality.
This hero is Paul Rokich. He was born in 1932 in Utah. His father worked for the big copper mine at Read More
For us to look at 2004 Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai today, it is difficult to imagine all she has been through on her journey to empower rural women.
I can still recall the first time I read of Wangari Maathai and her Green Belt Movement. It was a 1978 issue of International Wildlife Magazine. It Read More
Human impact on natural areas can have drastic unintended circumstances. In fact, introduced or alien species are one of the leading drivers of the loss of biological diversity. Most famously, these losses are the result of the invading species outcompeting natives, who typically are naive to such pressures. Not all alien species take hold, Read More
