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

By Eugene Linden

Book Overview

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 Geographic and Time to 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.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0670022519
• ISBN13: 9780670022519
• Release Date: March 2011
• Publisher: Viking Books
• Length: 260 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

Food for thought

Linden raises thoughtful consideration of the history, cultures and impact of modern influences on foreign societies and environments. His tone is reflective and philosophical without being preachy. The scope is broad and worth considering. Insightful.