Kirkus Reviews QR Code
LIVING PLANET by World Wildlife Fund

LIVING PLANET

Preserving Edens of the Earth

by World Wildlife Fund

Pub Date: Sept. 1st, 1999
ISBN: 0-609-60466-X
Publisher: Crown

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. It’s 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.