but those adventurers who had made its passage fought fiercely and won protection. Culturally intact Dyak villages in Borneo are sustained because outside visitors who witnessed their magic made public battle against timber and oil companies otherwise poised with bulldozers.

In the 1980s I explored the Alas Basin in Sumatra, running through the largest orangutan reserve in the world. Timber

poaching has reduced the once luxurious habitat to a scrawny shadow, and the “men of the forest” are on the brink of extinction. In the late 1970s I led the first descent of Chile’s Río Bio-Bío, a tumbling gem that offered up some of the finest whitewater in the world. I tried to convince as many folks as possible to come glide this course, but not enough, as a local power company rolled over resistance, and broke

the wild water with a series of dams.

In 1981 I joined President Kenneth Kaunda in Lusaka to help save the last of the black rhinos of Zambia. I pledged to motivate more to come and see, but I never made good on the promise. When I returned last year all the rhinos were gone.

A recent census estimates the lion population in Africa has decreased 95 percent since the 1950s. In the 1960s the Luangwa

Valley was home to 100,000 elephants, the largest concentration in the world. Today, because of poaching, an estimated 15,000 remain. In Madagascar 90 percent of the forests are gone. And as we gaze about the world, it is not just trees, rivers and animals vanishing. The Dead Sea is drying up; variegated coral reefs are bleaching; glaciers are retreating; the leaning tower of Pisa is falling.

Over the decades I have witnessed many special places preserved and lost, and the critical vector was more often than not the number of visitors who trekked the landscape or floated the river and were touched deeply by their unique qualities of beauty and spirit. When such a space became threatened, there was a constituency for whom the place was personal, a collective force ready to lend energy,

monies and time to preservation.

Not the only one, but a bona fide solution to saving the extraordinary natural assets of our world is to hearten enough people to come and see, as then the value of wonder is felt and the interconnectedness of all things becomes real and personal, not academic. It is those who have discovered these places who have been key to saving them, and to a part of themselves.

Renowned explorer, provider of journeys with meaning, master of the adventure narrative, Richard Bangs offers in his new book a vision for travel that will make a difference and restore our dreams for a better world.

truly Sustainable

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