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Reclaiming the Last Wild Places: A New Agenda for Biodiversity by Roger
L. DiSilvestro, Wiley, pp 250, $24.95

Like many foreigners, I have somehow absorbed the idea that the battle
for nature conservation in the US has more or less been won. Maybe I was
persuaded by the size and financial muscle of America’s green groups. Or
perhaps I was lulled by newspaper articles suggesting, for example, that
economic development of an entire region had been sacrificed for the sake
of an owl.

Roger DiSilvestro, a stylish writer and ardent campaigner, has changed
my mind. In Reclaiming the Last Wild Places (meaning America’s last wild
places), he argues that the US’s great national treasures of forest, rangeland
and wetland are not in safe hands. Wilderness and free enterprise have equal
claims on the American psyche. DiSilvestro explores the resulting conflicts
in a history of conservation with lovingly written sketches of its heroes.

The central claim is that the mechanism for protecting wilderness areas
has changed little for decades, if not for a century or more. His most striking
example is that the fee charged to a miner for staking a claim on public
lands has remained the same since 1872. DiSilvestro’s agenda for the future
includes technical solutions such as creating ecological corridors between
threatened habitats. More ambitious is his call for a new law, and a new
government agency, to protect biodiversity. This, he estimates, will cost
$50 billion.

He is unapologetic about the value of protecting species, any species,
for the sake of pure diversity. There’s no room for arguments about extinctions
being natural, or inevitable, much less for triage. ‘Better to err on the
side of life than on the side of oblivion,’ is his line, with no time for
the ‘reasonable’ school of environmentalism which seeks a balance between
economic development and protecting the wilderness.

DiSilvestro argues: ‘Are we in balance if we give up half the nation’s
wetlands and protect half?’ But half the original wetlands in the US have
already disappeared, to make way for shopping malls, homes, farms and factories.
If an even split between development and nature is a balance, we need
to stop destroying the wetlands now.

‘In their efforts to be reasonable and realistic, politically sophisticated
and pragmatic, the conservation groups often agree that we have to give
up some wildlands to human need. How many generations can give up 50 per
cent or 90 per cent or even 10 per cent, before nothing is left to be reasonable
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I read this book on a trip to one of Britain’s, and perhaps Western
Europe’s, last wilderness areas, the Outer Hebrides. It is the scene of
a familiar conflict over plans to remove mountains for so-called ‘superquarries’.
As a ‘reasonable’ and ‘politically sophisticated’ environmentalist, I had
come to accept the superquarries as part of a trade-off between prosperity
and scenery. DiSilvestro has changed my mind about that as well.

Michael Cross is a freelance journalist.