Disappearing Destinations: 37 Places in Peril and What Can Be Done to Help Save Them

By Kimberly Lisagor and Heather Hansen

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307277364
• ISBN13: 9780307277367
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 0.98 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

A Call to Leave the Planet Better Than We Found It

It is rare to find a travel book that can bring to life the allure of the world's greatest destinations while instilling in you the urgency to protect them. But here it is, chapter after chapter of thorough and deeply authoritative travel reporting executed as beautifully descriptive prose. It would be one thing for the authors to have given us a sense of the importance of the places with the abundance of facts they have gathered. But their own reverence for these places comes through in every detail, from the sprawling panoramas that feel so real that it's like you're there to the endearing way they describe the "critters" that inhabit every landscape. Great travel writing makes you feel like you've visited a place without having left your seat. The best travel writing makes you want to jump out of your seat and go there. Disappearing Destinations adds another layer: you read each chapter and encounter each new place with a sense of wonder at its incredible natural gifts, you hope that what you are reading never transitions into historical artifact, and you are given the action plans to ensure that it doesn't. Disappearing Destinations is a must-read for anyone who's interested our natural paradises and wants to know what they can do before they're lost forever.