"We're sending you to the middle of nowhere."
-- Thor Hanson's Peace Corps supervisor
"The middle of nowhere" turned out to be Africa's Bwindi National Park where the young and passionate Peace Corps volunteer Thor Hanson was sent to develop the nascent gorilla tourist program, located within Uganda's Impenetrable Forest. With graceful prose dosed with humor and high adventure, Hanson relates the story of his time spent amongst the gorillas and rural villages of remotest Africa in his memoir, The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda (July, 2008; 1500 Books; ISBN: 978-1-933698-19-9)
With humility and wit Hanson navigates the local customs, mores and bureaucracy that governed everything from love to superstition. In an isolated jungle village he directed the building of an eco-tourism infrastructure, fended off millions of soldier ants, and survived the local hooch, while studying the mountain gorillas, who in turn taught him more than he could ever have expected. Part travelogue, memoir and ecological treatise, The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda sucks you deep into the mystery of Africa and beauty of Thor's storytelling.
The project in Bwindi introduced gorilla tourism as an economic incentive for conservation, an integral piece of the ongoing effort to save the species…I found myself equally captivated by the warmth and generosity of the Ugandan people, and by the country's complex culture and history. I came to realize that one cannot discuss the future of gorillas meaningfully without placing them in the social and political context of modern Africa…Uganda's mountain gorillas exist as part of the inseparable weave of people and landscape, and there will not be hope for either until there is hope for both.
--from The Impenetrable Forest: My Gorilla Years in Uganda
Wilderness Comes Home:
Rewilding the Northeast
Thor Hanson, contributor |
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The first book to look at wilderness in the northeastern US, Wilderness Comes Home features a new approach based on ecological reserve design to protect biological diversity, rewilding and restoring lands to wilderness, and embedding wilderness in a landscape of sustainably managed farmland and forestland. It addresses major theoretical and practical aspects of this important issue -- whether, why, and how to reestablish wilderness areas in the Northeast. Although Western wilderness models already exist for undeveloped areas, Eastern models are still evolving. Protection and social management are being urged not for the "forest primeval" but for recovering areas, in which returning species such as moose and peregrine falcons roam over new growth softwoods and hardwoods, interspersed with the stone walls that once marked field boundaries. |
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