The Ragged Edge of the World Encounters at the Frontier Where Modernity, Wildlands, and Indigenous Peoples Meet

by Linden, Eugene

• ISBN13: 9780670022519
• ISBN10: 0670022519
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-03-17
• Publisher: Viking Adult

Summary

A noted environmental writer relives his experiences of how earth's far corners have yielded to or resisted modernity. For forty years Eugene Linden has explored global environmental issues in books and for publications ranging from National Geographicand Timeto Foreign Affairs. Linden's diverse assignments have brought him to ragged edges of the globe, the sites where modernity, tradition, and wildlands collide. A money and ideas from the West have seeped into places like Polynesia, the Amazon, and the Arctic, Linden has witnessed dramatic transformations. Even in the Ndoki, celebrated as the most pristine and isolated rainforest in Congo, the impact of the outside world now intrudes in the form of dust blowing in from the north and loggers encroaching from all other directions. In the Ragged Edge of the World, Linden recounts his adventures at this slippery and fast-changing frontier-Vietnam in 1971 and 1994, New Guinea and Borneo, pygmy forests and Machu Picchu, the Arctic and Antartica, Cuba and Midway Island-charting onrushing social and environmental change. An elegy for what has been lost and a celebration of those cultures resilient enough to maintain their vibrancy. Linden's new book captures the world at a turning point and offers an intimate look at creatures and cultures as they encounter and try to adapt to globalization.

Author Biography

Eugene Linden is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Parrot’s Lament, The Future in Plain Sight, Silent Partners, and other books on animals and the environment. He has consulted for the U.S. State Department, the UN Development Program, and he is a widely traveled speaker and lecturer. In 2001, Yale University named Linden a Poynter Fellow in recognition of his writing on the environment.  He lives in Nyack, New York, and Washington, D.C.