Amazon.com: Living Planet: Preserving Edens of the Earth: World Wildlife Fund, Noel Grove, Frans Lanting, Galen Rowell, David Doubilet: Books

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The World Wildlife Fund has an ambitious goal. With its Living Planet campaign, WWF intends to preserve a bit of every major ecosystem type in the world. From Borneo to Ethiopia, Angola to Oregon, these conservation areas are a serious effort to prevent the complete destruction of rare and unique wildlife habitat. The project's goals are stated in the introduction to Living Planet:

By conserving the broadest variety of the world's habitats, we can conserve the broadest variety of the world's species and most endangered wildlife.... Regardless of where they are located, Global 200 ecoregions are all unique expressions of biological diversity, each with its own highly distinctive species, ecological processes, and evolutionary phenomena.

To chronicle this "conservationist's vision of Noah's ark," WWF sent three extraordinarily talented nature photographers around the world. Frans Lanting specializes in intimate animal portraits, Galen Rowell in capturing mountainous landscapes, and David Doubilet in the underwater world. Each photographer contributes unforgettable portraits of the beauty and wonder of Earth's most fragile places. Living Planet is a truly stunning testament to the difficulties and successes of the Global 200 project. Breathtaking photos introduce readers to the diversity of plant and animal life in the ecoregions. Here's a small sample: a pair of tortoises basking on an island in the Indian Ocean. An enclosed wall poster shows the ecoregions around the globe. And to complete the package, a portion of the proceeds from the sale of Living Planet goes to the World Wildlife Fund to help them continue their conservation work. --Therese Littleton

From Kirkus Reviews
The World Wildlife Fund has been working to preserve a selection of unique and biologically diverse terrestrial, freshwater, and marine habitats, a project called Global 200. This book of photographs is a paean to that endeavor. Its visually stunning, as the work of Galen Rowell, Frans Lanting, and David Doubilet is expected to be, and the text is well-intended, forgettable pap: ``We occupy an extraordinary planet, a spherical garden teeming with life.'' The thrust here is nature magnificent, shorn of tooth and claw and all the rough edges, in her finest clothes and most beguiling company: Lanting concentrates on the humors and conviviality found in plants and animals; Rowell works with the potentially outrageous effects of natural light on the landscape; and Doubilet shoots the otherworld of the marine subsurface. The unfortunate, and unintended, message percolating from these pages is that conservation organizations like the WWF have given up on man's instinctive willingness to do right by planet Earth. Like refugees running from the onslaught, they are grabbing their most precious tokens of remembrance and stealing them off to an uncertain future, while they can. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Living Planet: Preserving Edens of the Earth (Hardcover)

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